Film Review: Rowdy Rathore -- a mess of maal, masala and moustache

“[Pitaji] kaha karte thhe ki manushya ko apne aadarshon aur moochhon ka uchit aadar karna chahiye,” (Father used to say that a man must respect his principles and his moustaches), went Amol Palekar’s brilliant faux-soulful paean to the moustache in the original Golmaal. “Moustache is the mirror of human soul and mind, moochh toh mann ka darpan hai.”

In a cleverer, kinder universe, Rowdy Rathore might have been a 21^st century comic tribute to the power of the moochh. After all, like the old Golmaal, it features a double role where the hero’s two avatars are distinguishable only by a moustache (though both Akshays have a moustache here: one turned up, the other down), and much crucial dialogue that turns on moochhes.

Unfortunately, though, Prabhudeva’s Hindi remake of 2006’s Telugu hit Vikramarkudu has neither the wit nor the charm needed to craft a real send-up. In fact, it’s not at all clear whether we’re meant to be able to laugh at the ridiculous, over-the-top masculinity of SSP Rathore’s oft-repeated desire to die with a smile on his face, twirling his moustaches. I have the terrible feeling that this stuff is deadly earnest. Our hero takes his moochh even more seriously than Utpal Dutt did.

The plot is fairly convoluted. SSP Vikram Rathore – the man who wants his moustache cut off if he dies in a fight – is a fiery police inspector with a track record for incorruptibility and bravado. His arrival in the village of Devgarh puts him into immediate confrontation with a family of South Indians-playing-Bihari villains, headed by the gross tongue-rolling Nasser. Rathore temporarily breaks the reign of terror under which the villagers have been labouring for years. He is nearly killed in retaliation, but while the villains think he’s dead, he secretly recuperates and moves undercover to Mumbai.

Meanwhile, Rathore’s cherubic little daughter, pining for her lost father, stumbles upon his lookalike, a child-hating conman called Shiva. After the kind of heart-tugging that would convert even King-Kong, Shiva finally discovers his paternal side. But the fetching Bihari girl he’s just wooed – Sonakshi Sinha – isn’t too happy to discover that her new boyfriend comes with a pint-sized attachment who keeps plaintively calling him Papa. Cue grand misunderstanding, convenient disappearance of heroine, and shift to pure action.

The rest of Rowdy Rathore is a remarkably trashy hotchpotch of a million things you’ve seen before. Singham-style action sprinkled with ridiculous macho dialogue, tick. Don-style replacement of deadly serious hero by comic double, tick. Brain pe pressure that gets worse when the sun is hot (think back to Amitabh Bachchan’s brain tumour in Majboor) and magically disappears when rained on, tick. Imaginary village that some have been calling Sholay-style but that really feels like Agneepath – tick. The echo of Agneepath feels particularly strong: Devgarh is set around a rocky outcrop; the terrified villagers scrape and bow before an evil 80s-style villain; crowds of villagers assemble to be passive witnesses to the violent death of their sole possible saviour – the stringing up of SSP Rathore is highly evocative of the tableaux of Deenanath Chauhan’s death.

But the 2012 Agneepath, while every inch a mass entertainer, actually made the effort to create an identifiable character for its heroine – Priyanka Chopra’s excitable Kali had both a believable backstory and aspirations for the future: a beauty parlour in Dongri, marriage to her childhood love Vijay. Rowdy Rathore, on the other hand, is the sort of film where the “masala” label is an excuse to justify a hero who calls his girlfriend “mera maal” and where the heroine’s declared “special talent” is her gleaming gori waistline, with the camera zooming in grossly on the love handles our thieving hero can’t keep his hands off. Deprived of even the couple of “feisty” lines that made her Dabanng debut so bizarrely feted, Sonakshi’s character reaches its depressing nadir when she actually puts into words her vision of this ‘romance’: “Shaadi ke baad har hafte shopping le jaoge ki nahi?” If this is what the ‘common man’ thinks women want, they probably get the hellish marriages they deserve.

Rowdy Rathore does get one woman – the repeatedly raped wife of a policeman (Yashpal Sharma) – to finally turn avenging Draupadi. But her angry pummelling of Nasser is probably the only moment in the whole film when the spotlight is not monopolised by Akshay Kumar. From stealing cellphones out of people’s hands mid-conversation to wiping out whole armies of goondas, Krishna-like, with a Sudarshana chakra-esque weapon, there’s no doubt that Akshay is what makes this film somewhat watchable. He may look indubitably older – particularly in some of the gross tummy-displaying choreography that Prabhudeva thinks is seductive or something – but he still jumps off buildings with aplomb, and remains winsome enough to make you smile. But in an industry that swears by him, can’t Akshay Kumar get himself a star vehicle that’s not a half-baked rehash of a zillion other films? Is it too much to ask for plot twists that you can’t see coming a mile away, villains who might actually scare us, and perhaps an actual female lead rather than a waist-in-attendance? One lives in hope.

Published on Firstpost

A Kapoor by Chance

My tribute to Rishi Kapoor, published in Open magazine in 2012:

Rishi is the least Kapoor-like of the Kapoors: shorn of the family mannerisms and preoccupation with their image. Now, on the eve of turning 60, he is getting the roles of a lifetime and relishing them, too.

On 26 January, 2012, India’s Republic Day, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions released Agneepath, a much-trumpeted remake of the 1990 cult classic of the same name. Among those who watch and wait for Hindi films, there was a buzz of anticipatory questions: what was Karan Johar thinking, remaking father Yash Johar’s most beloved movie? Could debutant director Karan Malhotra’s vision ever live up to the memories of Mukul Anand fans? How could the too-beautiful Hrithik possibly step into the impossibly large shoes of Bachchan’s caustic, sneering Vijay Dinanath Chauhan?

By afternoon, however, as the first-day-first-show folk got to their computers, everyone was talking about something else. Trending on Twitter was not #HrithikRoshan, #KaranJohar or even #Agneepath, but #RishiKapoor.

After a lifetime of being typecast as a baby-faced love machine, the 59-year-old actor’s concentrated villainy as Rauf Lala has surprised Hindi film fans. Both gloriously filmi and entirely convincing, Rishi Kapoor’s performance is not only Agneepath’s biggest talking point, but also the one thing about the film on which everyone agrees.

As proprietor of an empire in which meat exports form a front for a sleazy business of underage female flesh and cocaine, Kapoor’s Lala has the task of embodying unmitigated evil while also being the father-substitute under whose watchful eye our hero grows to full gangsterhood. He must be both the ruthless kasai (butcher) with glowering eyes and the portly Muslim patriarch, mai-baap for the poorest of his community. At one point in the film, Rauf Lala is double-crossed and loses his son, and despite the terrible things his character does in running his unsavoury empire of business, Rishi makes you feel, for a moment, something akin to grief. I cannot think of anyone else who could have done it.

There is something about Rishi Kapoor’s face that makes you believe. It was true in 1970, when he was the slightly overweight teenager in Mera Naam Joker who made his entry by falling clumsily into the middle of a ring of expertly-skating classmates—and falling as clumsily in love with his sophisticated young teacher Miss Mary (Simi Garewal); it was true through the 1980s and 90s, when he managed to convincingly romance a long line of nubile actresses who kept growing further away from him in age. And it is more true than ever today, when he seems increasingly able to transform himself from Rishi Kapoor into the charming Sardar uncleji of Love Aaj Kal (2009), the anxious producer Romy Rolly of Luck By Chance (2009), or the hapless maths teacher of Do Dooni Char (2010).

Perhaps Lata Mangeshkar was onto something: she once called Rishi the most talented of the Kapoors, because his performances came without the baggage of mannerisms—without the bombast, melancholic excess or ada (stylish charm) so integral to the star personas cultivated by his grandfather Prithviraj, his father Raj, or his uncle Shammi. But despite his fine, often nuanced work, many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s simply took it for granted that this man, whose cherubic face retained an uncanny vulnerability despite the legendary Kapoor kilos having begun to fill out his Fair Isle sweaters, should continue to dance his way through the hearts of younger and younger heroines. After all, he was the original loverboy.

Rishi Kapoor’s indisputable-and-eternal claim to that title was established with Bobby (1973), in which his father created for him a persona which was to last him for decades: the boyish, vulnerable young man who suddenly finds himself terribly, irredeemably in love. Love just happened—often at first sight—and then there was nothing you could do about it except summon the courage to tell the girl. And then the families. Despite the grandness of the romantic ideal—especially when, as in Bobby or Prem Rog (1982), love demanded full-on rebellion against all social and familial strictures—there was always an endearing artlessness to Rishi’s wooing of the heroine, and a light, frothy, friendly sort of relationship thereafter. Think of Monty in Karz (1980), announcing his love in song almost as soon as he meets Tina Munim, or Ajay in Khel Khel Mein (1975), where he and Neetu’s friends-as-much-as-lovers relationship was exemplified in the song Khullam Khulla Pyar Karenge Hum Dono.

Growing up, though, it was the ragged, edgy angularity of Amitabh Bachchan that had my exclusive attention. I only registered the aching, intense beauty of Raja in Bobby as a 20-something adult sitting in the US. I found myself—because of all the Rishi-love arising from an emergent Bollywood blogosphere dominated by White female fans—in possession of an inexhaustible stack of images of Rishi in all his technicolour glory: the wine-red bellbottoms, the blue bobble-cap, the oversized sunglasses, the sideburns, and oh, the lips.

Even in a cinematic culture known to make heroes of fair-skinned men with red lips, one would imagine that if you looked as delectably baby-faced as Rishi, it would have been a huge concern not to be thought of as what Enid Blyton might have called namby-pamby.

And yet, Rishi has never seemed insecure about his non-macho looks. He is happy to play innocent, though he often belies that first impression with an act of  daredevilry. In the first scene of Khel Khel Mein, the reigning college dadaVikram (Rakesh Roshan) rags the baby-faced new boy so relentlessly and successfully that Neetu Singh and the other girls beg him to stop. Just when you aren’t expecting it, though, the ‘so sweet’ new boy turns around and matches the bully blow for blow. (Later in the same film, he gives a perfect rendition of stage fright before delivering an impromptu performance, complete with guitar and trademark muffler.) So secure was Rishi about his prettiness that he spent at least one film largely in drag: Rafoo Chakkar (1975). In this silly and rather charming adaptation of Some Like it Hot (1959), Rishi alternates between two fake identities. He’s wonderful as the bumbling millionaire in a red-and-white chequered blazer who walks a wide-eyed Neetu Singh onto someone else’s Srinagar houseboat with an “Aaiye, aaiye, sab mera hai—bagh, phool, pani, scenery”. But he seems even more ridiculously effervescent when he’s camping it up in mini-skirts and feathery headdresses as Neetu’s fellow dancer and confidante Devi. 


That’s the other thing about Rishi: he always managed to give the impression of having a rollicking good time. Dancing seems to have come naturally to him, and it is remarkable how often he actually plays a performer in his early films: a small-time musician in a band, an enormously successful pop star, a qawwali singer. He was an entertainer actually playing an entertainer.

There’s a self-referentiality there which may or may not be deliberate. But Rishi Kapoor’s roles over the last few years have contained much cannibalising of his cinematic persona: singing Main shayar toh nahi with screen-son Saif Ali Khan in the Yash Raj production Hum Tum (2004), or doling out advice on how a proper love affair ought to be conducted— again to Saif Ali Khan—in Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal.

The most remarkable self-referential role of all, though, is in the tragically under-watched Chintuji (2009), a wishful parable about modernity, corruption and the nature of celebrity in India. Director Ranjit Kapoor (a Hindi theatre veteran whose previous association with the film industry was as a dialogue-writer for such memorable films as Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Bandit Queen and Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa) casts Rishi as a semi-fictitious version of himself. The filmstar Rishi Kapoor, affectionately known to his fans as Chintuji, is invited to the charmingly unspoilt town of Hadbahedi, where—according to the film’s narrative—he happens to have been born. The townsfolk hope to make their town better-known, while Chintuji, accompanied by a likeable young PR agent called Devika (Kulraj Randhawa), wants to make Hadbahedi the first rung of his future political career. But the more the good people of Hadbahedi try to please their honoured guest, the more unbearably Chintuji behaves: insisting on airconditioning when there’s no power, demanding desi murga (chicken) and whisky of his vegetarian, teetotalling hosts, and only looking happy when he’s told that the painted wooden cut-out of him that’s been created for the occasion is a full 35 feet (higher, he is assured, than the 25 foot one of Amitabh in Allahabad and the 30 foot one of Rajnikanth in Chennai). The actor who apparently refused Yash Chopra’s Darr (later made with Shah Rukh Khan) because he felt his audience didn’t accept him in negative roles has clearly come a long way.

Among the odder pleasures of Chintuji is a sequence where a B-movie director (Saurabh Shukla) shoots a song with Rishi as a feather-bedecked tribal chieftain thumping happily away to lyrics that go: ‘Tarantino, Wilder, Capra/ Ozu, Bertolucci, Peckinpah…’. But Chintuji also contains the filmic reunion of Rishi Kapoor with Kseniya Ryabinkina, the Russian dancer who played Marina, the second love of Raj Kapoor’s life in Mera Naam Joker. The coming together of the two actors 40 years later is so spectacularly unlikely that it cannot but be affecting. But the real purpose of Kseniya’s appearance is to create a self-referential cinematic moment, one in which the lying, cheating Chintuji of the film is transformed because an old Russian woman—a character from another film—exhorts Rishi Kapoor to become as ‘good’ a person as his real-life father. It is a point at which the real and the imaginary come together to create a true Hindi cinema moment, a moment at which one cannot but wonder what it is like to be Rishi Kapoor.

In a wonderfully unusual 1975 Filmfare profile of Raj Kapoor and his sons, the well-known non-filmi columnist Behram Contractor (better known as Busybee) described the beginning of the interview thus: ‘Rishi was nervous, tongue-tied and timid, and Daboo was respectful. Raj Kapoor is known to have this sort of influence on his sons… Seeing them sitting together opposite me, I had the strange impression that I was the principal of Campion School and Raj Kapoor had brought his two sons to be admitted.’ Later, Busybee asks ‘the boys’ if they had ever thought of doing anything other than being in films. The responses are revealing. ‘Daboo said, ‘I was destined to be in films. Therefore I was born in the Kapoor family.’… Chintu said, ‘Same’. And he looked at me with eyes which said, Why-don’t-you-stop-pestering-me-with-questions-when-my-father-is-here.’

Growing up in the shadow of a legend is never easy. Even the otherwise sympathetic Busybee thought Rishi was a bad actor, ‘except when directed by his father, when he is super’. But what Busybee’s sharp eye caught was not just a shyness in front of his father, but a refusal of braggadocio remarkable for any actor, especially a Kapoor.

Rishi Kapoor has spent a lifetime refusing to spin grand narratives around his work. “I didn’t make a great effort. I just did what I was told,” he says in The Kapoors (Penguin, 2005). “My father used to show me what to do and I did it.” But his father has been gone for nearly 24 years, and he had established himself independently of his father’s films many years before that. Now, watching him in Agneepath, an amiable patriarch presiding over a qawwali-carpet-chandelier song of the sort his younger self made so energetically his own, one feels the grand narrative has been spun for Rishi Kapoor.

Published in Open magazine, 2012.

Playing With Fire? The new Agneepath versus the old

The Agneepath of 2012 – producer Karan Johar’s suitably filmi, emotional tribute to his father Yash Johar – risks a million departures in terms of characters, narrative and tenor, while clinging tightly to the emotional core of the 1990 Agneepath produced by Johar Senior: a boy whose life path is defined by the murder of his father. And like the 1990 film which earned a then visibly ageing Amitabh Bachchan his first National Award even as it sank at the box office, the 2012 film is unapologetically grand.

But then Karan Malhotra’s Agneepath – and the debutante director has definitively made the film his own – is not just a tribute to Mukul Anand’s 1990 cult classic, but to the tradition of the Hindi film epic itself. The structure of Hindi cinema owes much to the 19th century Parsi-Urdu theatre, popular social melodramas filled with flamboyant romance, ill-fated passions and most crucially, family sagas. As Javed Akhtar said on a panel at the recently-concluded Jaipur Literature Festival, some Western cinematic cultures may thrive on the artistic economy of the short story, but we Indians have sagas in our blood: “Jab tak do-teen peedhiyon ki baat na ho, hamein mazaa nahi aata”.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the contemporary Hindi film – and I speak not just of the small sleeper hits and adventures-in-newness like Delhi Belly or LSD, but also of the blockbusters, the Ra-Ones and Don 2s and Bodyguards – seems to have begun to abandon the family saga. When was the last time you saw on screen that staple constituent of most Hindi films until the 1990s, the hero’s childhood? The last one I can think of is Dabangg, and before that, Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky Lucky Oye. And if you think carefully about both those films, you’ll agree that even if the whole childhood thing is being done self-consciously – within quotation marks, so to speak – the hero’s travails acquire that much more emotional heft because we know what life was like for him, growing up. The movie becomes that much more Hindi movie.

So it was with pleasure that I found that 2012’s Agneepath opens, like its 1990 predecessor, with the 12-year-old Vijay receiving his first life-lesson from his father. It is a magnificent beginning: a child being guided away from the temptation to hit back (“Sawaal shakti ka nahi, shakti ke istemaal ka hai”), in a scene that resounds with Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s famously stirring call to the uncompromised – and uncompromising – path:

“Vriksh ho bhale khade,
Ho ghane, ho bade,
Ek patra chaanh bhi maang mat, maang mat, maang mat!
Agnipath, agnipath, agnipath!”

(“Trees there may be,
Massive, dense,
But ask not, ask not for the shade of a single leaf:
Walk the path of fire.”)

The year is 1977. The place is Mandwa, a small village off the coast of Bombay where electricity has not yet arrived. Vijay’s father, Master Deenanath Chavan (the school teacher, as in so many stories that have come out of the modernising of this subcontinent, standing in for the possibility of progress) urges the villagers not to give up their land, thus becoming the sole obstacle in the path of the man who wants to make cocaine in the guise of a salt factory: Kancha Cheena.

Here is where the new film makes its first major departure from the old one. It transforms Kancha Cheena from Danny Denzongpa’s efficient, cold-blooded, almost refined outsider into a “sarvashaktishaali, sarvashaktimaan” insider personifed by the gleaming, fleshy excess of a bald Sanjay Dutt. By turning Kancha into the local zamindar’s son and an ex-gangster returned from the city, the film combines in his single fearsome persona a terrifyingly intimate view of the rural masses (“jeevan pilpila raha hai, jeevan gidgida raha hai”) and an absolute lack of humanity, a ruthlessness couched as the ascetic disavowal of moh-maya.

Kancha’s manipulation of the villagers into lynching the one man who stands between them and hell is of a piece with his view of them as sub-human creatures. But this sense of the villagers as a helpless, indistinguishable mass remains a deeply unsettling note: the crowd that aids the killing of Deenanath never actually comes together again, neither to confront its oppressors, nor to support its heroes.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, because Agneepath is the ultimate hero versus villain battle, a moral battle about the meaning of masculinity that pits truth against power. The new film makes the villain and his location both elemental and epic, actually referring to him as Ravana in his Lanka. Kiran Deohans and Ravi K Chandran’s cinematography does wonders, creating a truly mythic landscape of craggy grey cliffs and huge banyan trees.

But Mandwa is only one among the locales that the film brings pulsatingly to life, and the transformation of Kancha only one part of its reimagining of the original. Between the tragic beginning and the final heroic encounter, the film presents a veritable parade of memorable scenes, dense with imagery and staged with impeccable attention to detail. The many chhitput bad guys of the older film are replaced by the concentrated villainy of a new character, the cheerfully lethal Rauf Lala. Rishi Kapoor, cast against a lifetime of stereotyping as the cherubic love-machine, steps lithely and brilliantly into the shoes of this kasai with the kajjalkor eyes. From the almost over-the-top Oriental fantasy of Rauf Lala’s introductory scene where he auctions off whimpering girl children as slaves, Kapoor completely inhabits the skin of the Muslim patriarch, the drugs and trafficking king who adopts the Hindu Vijay as his own.

Malhotra extracts wonderful performances from his other actors, too: from Priyanka Chopra as Vijay’s love interest, the Madhavi character who served merely as mute receptacle for Amitabh’s woes in the original thankfully replaced here by Kaali, the irrepressibly chatty Dongri girl he grows up with; from Zareena Wahab as the mother who cannot understand her son’s turn to violence, beautifully underplaying the original Rohini Hattangady performance; from Kanika Tiwari as Vijay’s sister Shiksha, Neelam’s disco-dancing character replaced by a fresh-faced teenager whose innocence makes the film’s good-and-evil conflicts that much more powerful.


Of course, what everyone’s waiting to see is whether Hrithik can fill the impossibly large shoes of the industry’s greatest ever star. What he does is fascinating. Instead of trying to play Vijay Chavan in the almost garrulous dialoguebaaz style that had come to define Amitabh’s star persona in the 80s, Hrithik plays him as a quiet, intense figure, his grief so tightly wound up inside him that he cannot even bring himself to voice it. Hrithik is not Amitabh, and he knows it, but it is a performance that draws ever so slightly, perhaps unknowingly, on the younger Amitabh of Zanjeer and Deewar.

If you’re a diehard fan of the old Agneepath, you may find it hard to accept the new one, as deliberately different as it is. But Karan Malhotra’s rich reimagining is a true homage, one that keeps alive the spirit of the old but doesn’t flinch from creating a fresh world for that spirit to inhabit.  

Published in Firstpost.