Archive for September, 2011
2011 Chicago South Asian Film Festival
As if the eight Indian films showing in Chicago area theaters this weekend weren’t enough to keep you busy, the second annual Chicago South Asian Film Festival opens tonight with a screening of 2008′s Rang Rasiya, followed by a Q & A session with the movie’s stars, Nandana Sen and Randeep Hooda. Actor Gulshan Grover, whose film I Am Kalam screens on Saturday, is also expected to be in attendance at the opening night gala.
The festival, which takes place at Columbia College from Friday, September 30 through Sunday, October 2, will screen twenty-seven films, from features to documentaries to shorts. Ticket prices for individual films range from $5 to $10, but there are a number of free films showing at the Chicago Cultural Center throughout the weekend.
In honor of the festival, Kama Indian Bistro in La Grange is offering 20% off meals to patrons who present their CSAFF ticket stubs through the end of October.
Movie Review: Mausam (2011)
1 Star (out of 4)
In the film industry, a “logline” is a single sentence that summarizes a movie’s plot. It’s an effective way to pique an audience’s interest or pitch a story to investors. Take Die Hard, for example: A cop’s attempt to reconcile with his ex-wife is derailed when her office building is taken over by terrorists.
Loglines aren’t unique to Hollywood; many great Indian movies can be succinctly summarized as well. Chak De India: The Indian Women’s Field Hockey team must overcome their own internal struggles before they can take on the rest of the world.
I’ve tried to craft a logline for Mausam, and I can’t do it. I don’t know what Mausam is about. Okay, I obviously know that it’s about two young people whose fondness for each other spans decades. So what?
In my example loglines for Die Hard and Chak De India, the conflicts that fuel the plots of both films are contained within the sentences. John McClane is at odds with both his ex-wife and the terrorists. The women’s hockey team fights internal and external battles.
Mausam‘s biggest problem is that it has no conflict. There’s no reason why the lead characters, Harry (Shahid Kapoor) and Aayat (Sonam Kapoor), can’t be together. Their parents don’t object, they’re not engaged to other people, they’re not driven apart by war or culture. Rather, their budding romance is stymied by minor obstacles and a lack of communication.
Harry and Aayat begin falling for one another in Harry’s village in Punjab, where Aayat has moved to escape violent riots in Kashmir. Then Aayat leaves in the middle of the night, without so much as leaving a note for Harry.
Seven years later (in 1999), Aayat and Harry meet again in Scotland. Actually, she spots him first but doesn’t say anything. She waits for him to notice her among all the women in Edinburgh, even though he has no reason to suspect she’d be there.
Her explanation for why she fled so suddenly years earlier? Her dad phoned and asked her to join him in Mumbai. No emergency, and she wasn’t in danger, she just moved house in the matter of a few hours on a moment’s notice.
The couple appear to be on their way to marriage when, this time, Harry is abruptly called away without time to contact Aayat.
Aayat’s excuse for not contacting Harry is difficult to believe, but Harry has no excuse at all. He has Aayat’s cell phone number, her home phone number and her home address. Rather than call Aayat to tell her why he had to leave, he phones his sister in Switzerland and tells her to go to Scotland (without calling first) and meet Aayat in person to explain what happened. Of course, Aayat has herself moved to parts unknown by then.
Harry and Aayat meet several times in subsequent years before they finally commit to a future together during a preposterous action-packed climax. The finale is so stupid, I laughed out loud.
What makes the silliness of actor Pankaj Kapur’s directorial debut such a shame is that Mausam is a great-looking movie. Harry’s hometown is a charming village out of time. There are a number of breathtaking set pieces, as when Harry races on his bicycle to catch Aayat’s departing train. Closeups of Sonam Kapoor — who’s plenty cute on her own — make her look angelic.
Kapur might yet have great success as a director, so long as someone else writes the screenplay.
Another problem that will only affect international audiences is that Mausam‘s English subtitles are translated too literally, something that doesn’t work given the different sentence structures of Hindi and English. Consequently, the jokes aren’t funny, and one must spend so much mental energy reconstructing the words into meaningful sentences that it distracts from the action on screen.
Overall, Mausam proves that style doesn’t trump substance. As gorgeous as it looks, Mausam is too boring and silly to warrant the nearly three hours of attention it requires.
Links
- Mausam Official Website
- Mausam at Wikipedia
- Mausam at IMDb
- My Review of Chak De India
Movie Review: Chalo Dilli (2011)
2 Stars (out of 4)
Chalo Dilli is a road trip comedy in which a mismatched pair of strangers are forced to rely upon each other to reach their destination. It’s basically Planes, Trains and Automobiles, only with Steve Martin’s uptight character played by a woman.
That woman is Lara Dutta, who also produced the movie. Dutta plays Mihika, a picky investment banking executive used to getting things her way. She heads to the airport in Mumbai wearing a tight skirt and high heels that look as uncomfortable for air travel as they will be for her inevitable trek through the hinterlands.
Mihika’s journey is disrupted by Muna (Vinay Pathak), a crude cloth merchant with a chivalrous streak. His incessant yammering on the plane prompts Mihika to put on headphones, causing her to miss the announcement that the flight to Delhi has been diverted to Jaipur.
What should be a six-hour drive back to Delhi turns into an overnight adventure for Mihika and Muna, who assumes the role of chauffeur when the driver Mihika has hired falls asleep. The car breaks down, and the odd couple spend many hours together making their way to Delhi any way they can.
This premise should work particularly well in India, with its stark contract between urban and rural environments. The contrast sets up plenty of fish-out-of-water scenarios for city-bred Mihika, who starts the movie disgusted at the thought of flying on a “budget” airline instead of in first class.
But the movie never takes full advantage of its opportunities for comedy. None of the situations Mihika and Muna find themselves in are especially unusual or outrageous. The people they encounter are generally normal and helpful. It makes for a boring trip.
Mihika does get to wake up to a beautiful sunrise in the country and meet friendly locals, which is supposed to open her eyes to Muna’s somewhat odd life wisdom: Don’t sweat the small stuff, because there’s probably something much more serious in your life that you should be worried about.
As much as Chalo Dilli fancies itself an uplifting film, it isn’t really. Manu’s happy-go-lucky demeanor masks an inner pain that manifests itself in cruel jokes at his wife’s expense. The final scene between Mihika and Manu is uncomfortable to watch.
Rather than ending there, the movie tacks on an epilogue montage voiced-over by Mihika detailing the ways the lives of the villagers she and Muna encountered were improved by the experience. The movie gives the contradictory message that the simple life is beautiful, but not so perfect that it can’t be improved by a little attention from some city dwellers.
Chalo Dilli also takes a conflicted view of gender equality. Mihika and Muna argue after he wonders why so many men would be willing to work for her. She accuses him of believing that women should stay home and have babies. So what does Mihika decide to do in the epilogue? Stay home and have babies.
If Mihika had expressed career or life dissatisfaction earlier in the movie, perhaps the choice would’ve made sense. But it’s quite a leap from Mihika making a small gesture, such as delaying a business trip in order to attend a party, to her chucking her whole career to have kids. Axe the unnecessary epilogue and this mixed message isn’t an issue.
Links
- Chalo Dilli Official Website
- Chalo Dilli at Wikipedia
- Chalo Dilli at IMDb
Movie Review: Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2011)
3.5 Stars (out of 4)
Katrina Kaif and Imran Khan have been established Bollywood stars for years, but this has been something of a breakout summer for both of them. Kaif scored big at the box office with Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, and Khan showed serious comedy chops in Delhi Belly.
Headlining Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (“My Brother’s Bride”), Kaif and Khan seem their most at ease in front of the camera. Not only do they share a charming chemistry, but they give two of their strongest individual performances to date.
Khan anchors Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (MBKD, henceforth) as Kush, an aspiring director in India who gets an odd request from his brother in London, Luv (Ali Zafar). Having broken up with his longtime girlfriend, Piali (Tara D’Souza), Luv decides to entrust his romantic future to Kush. Luv asks his younger brother to find a nice Indian girl for him to marry.
Kush enlists his parents and friends to scour Dehradun for a bride for Luv. The ideal candidate turns out to be a reformed party girl named Dimple (Kaif), whom Kush met years earlier during her wilder days. She describes her qualifications thusly: “I am correctly beautiful and appropriately sexy.” She gets the gig.
Predictably, Kush and Dimple fall for each other as they make wedding preparations. Only after Luv arrives do they acknowledge the problem: she’s about to marry the wrong brother.
The fact that MBKD feels a bit like something we’ve seen before is actually its strength. Debutant filmmaker Ali Abbas Zafar (who’s not the Ali Zafar who plays Luv) clearly set out to make a feel-good romantic comedy, and he achieved his goal.
To play up the familiarity, the opening dance number pays homage to some famous Bollywood routines of the recent past. There are plenty of dance numbers, and all of them are entertaining and well-integrated into the plot.
A few slightly unexpected tweaks to the formula are a nice surprise. While Kush is the film’s main character, Dimple does more to drive the story forward. She’s not a passive damsel in distress, but rather an impatient problem solver whose impulsiveness gets her into trouble.
In another unexpected twist, MBKD doesn’t have a villain. I kept waiting for Luv to reveal himself to be an oaf, or for Piala to turn into a “crazy ex-girlfriend,” but all of the characters are nice people. The situation — not the characters — provides the conflict. It’s tricky to pull off, but Abbas Zafar handles it well.
The advantage of this approach is that the story doesn’t get bogged down in maudlin montages of Kush and Dimple staring forlornly into the rain as a singer laments the cruelty of fate. Rather, the lovebirds recognize a problem and set about fixing it.
The lone complaint I have about the movie is that several jokes depend on cultural references that American audiences likely don’t share. There are repeated references to Complan, which I learned after the movie is a British nutritional supplement. (See Ricky’s comment below for a more complete explanation of the Complan references.) This isn’t a reason to avoid the film, but American moviegoers should know in advance that they won’t get all the jokes.
Links
- Mere Brother Ki Dulhan Official Website
- Mere Brother Ki Dulhan at Wikipedia
- Mere Brother Ki Dulhan at IMDb
- My Review of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara
- My Review of Delhi Belly
Movie Review: That Girl in Yellow Boots (2011)
3.5 Stars (out of 4)
Note: This movie has no MPAA rating, but it is most definitely for adults only.
Ruth, the title character in That Girl in Yellow Boots, is a puzzle. She’s brave and forthright, yet she subjects herself to conditions unimaginably grim — embarking on a humiliating, painful quest in search of a goal that, were it not so personal, would hardly seem worth pursuing.
Ruth (Kalki Koechlin) leaves England for India to search for her father, a man she doesn’t remember and who her mother has painstakingly erased from their lives. A letter written to Ruth by her father expressing a desire to meet her proves unusually difficult to trace.
Unable to get an official Indian work permit, Ruth works in a disreputable massage parlor performing sex acts, using the proceeds to bribe officials to extend her travel visa. Being a white woman alone in India makes Ruth both a novelty and an object of desire. Her growing knowledge of Hindi puts her in the odd position of being neither a local nor a tourist.
The lone bright spot in Ruth’s life is not her druggie boyfriend, Prashant (Prashant Prakash), but Diwakar (Naseeruddin Shah), the only client who actually comes to Ruth just for the massage. He’s the father figure she’s been looking for, if only she could put aside her quest.
As the conditions of Ruth’s life go from bad to worse, it’s hard not to ask: Why? Why not give up the search? Why not go home, make some money doing something more dignified and resume the search later? But by the time we meet Ruth, she’s sacrificed so much that she seems unable to stop.
There’s also the question of why her father hasn’t made more of an effort than just writing a letter. If Ruth succeeds in finding him, can he possibly be worth the effort it took?
Koechlin is amazing as Ruth. The camera (behind which sits her real-life husband, director Anurag Kashyap) lingers on Ruth’s face, her blank expression showing the price she’s chosen to pay, shutting off her emotions while she seeks the one person she believes will love her without wanting anything in return.
Koechlin co-wrote the screenplay with Kashyap and used experiences from her own life to flavor Ruth’s world. Raised in India by French parents, Koechlin says she remembers being treated at times as though her skin color indicated an amoral character. Note that, in the movie, the other masseuses at the parlor are blonde.
That Girl in Yellow Boots is not fun, but Koechlin’s performance and Kashyap’s tense and thoughtful directing make watching it a worthwhile experience.
Links
- That Girl in Yellow Boots Official Website
- That Girl in Yellow Boots at Wikipedia
- That Girl in Yellow Boots at IMDb
- Huffington Post Story about That Girl in Yellow Boots
