Between Reviews: Win Some, Lose Some

WIN SOME, LOSE SOME

Reasons to look forward to new Hindi-indie movies… and reasons to be wary.

JUL 26, 2009 – THE PLACE OF DISREPUTE IS NAMED LA LA LODGE, and its disreputability is accented, at the doorstep, by a wash of lurid red light. A car zooms past – and beyond the eye of the camera – and then we hear the screech of brakes. A split second later, the vehicle backs up. We cut to a chauffeur tucking his cap under an arm and extending the other hand to knock, when the doors open, as if on their own. A customer exits with a whistle, tucking his belt into its last loopholes, leaving us in little doubt about why the belt was unbuckled in the first place. Like a courteous usher at a performance hall, he motions the chauffeur inside. The latter enters and faces a brightly painted woman who exhales wearily, hands on hips, features betraying irritation. “Haven’t I told you not to disturb me during business hours?”

A wide shot draws us to a shocking pink sari draped carelessly on the bed, as if she wanted to minimise even the time spent between dressing and undressing. She stands simply in a shiny blue blouse and an equally shiny petticoat, again a shocking pink. The chauffeur meekly replies, “Sorry, Gulbadan.” If she’s mollified, she doesn’t show it. Businesslike as ever, she commands him to button her blouse, and as he positions himself behind her, she begins to repair her makeup. The mirror in front is cracked, and while her reflection is clear as crystal, his (taller) image is a smoky smudge. Bending down and buttoning her up, he reveals the reason he backed up to the lodge. He has a Mercedes at his disposal, and he wonders if she’d like to go for a spin. She finally cracks a smile and slaps him affectionately on the cheek.

This stretch of screen time is filled, at once, with nothing and everything. Nothing significant has occurred in terms of plot or narrative motion, save for establishing that this man and this woman are lovers. But the detailing is everything – a little cosmos of a life lived in the fringes. Had this been a mainstream movie, the prostitute would have had a body to match Shilpa Shetty’s. But as Gulbadan bends forward to face the mirror, she reveals heavy hips – and the blemished mirror is itself a giveaway that this isn’t mainstream territory, where such a prop would have been spit-shined till a second before the director yelled “Action!” Everything about this wonderfully offhand sequence – though there’s nothing offhand about the meticulousness with which it’s been put together – is the reason I’ve come to look forward to the new Hindi-indie releases.

As for the reason I’ve become wary of new Hindi-indie releases, I offer the rest of Pankaj Advani’s Sankat City. By no stretch of the imagination is this anywhere close to a bad movie – but it tries so hard, so very hard, to be The Great Indian Absurdist Comedy that you’re reminded of the smug overachiever who sat in the first bench at class. After a point, you stop admiring his cleverness – you just want to smack him on the head and ask him to stop showing off. It’s not enough that a fraud-godman in a tub gets a male assistant in a pink towel to bathe him, there’s also someone so fond of fish, he imagines a potential girlfriend as a mermaid – every eccentric scene is so stuffed with eccentric dialogue and eccentric characters filled with eccentric quirks, you soon begin to yearn for respite from the wall-to-wall lunacy.

By the time a trickster duo poses as bomb-squad experts in order to get at a couple of crores in cash – the plot is about the revolving-door pursuit of ill-gotten money – I began to feel like I was strapped to my chair with an industrial-size funnel stuck down my gullet as a vat of “Whimsy: Extra Strength” was being tipped over. Perhaps a second viewing will allow me to better appreciate individual segments in isolation – because a lot of the plotting is indeed ingenious – but for now, the only contributor I came away with awe for is Manoj Pahwa, who’s outrageously entertaining as a small-time producer who dreams of building a Hollywood-style studio. This is the kind of bone-dry comedy where a hero who’s had a string of flops exclaims, “Is film ke baad, I’m going to be back with a bang. Boom!” A couple of scenes later, he’s dynamited.

Pahwa subsequently reports from the hospital that nothing much was left of his hero, “Aadhi khopdi, kuch ungliyan shungliyan…” Blackness in humour is no longer news in our multiplex cinema, but there are several such lines in Sankat City that raise tastelessness to delicious new levels. This is also the kind of film that stresses that we are in the age of multiplex cinema, and that the kind of films Pahwa makes (Gun Master Gagan) are no longer in vogue – and yet, there are qualmless borrowings from old-Bollywood staples like memory loss and lost-and-found siblings. A lot of Sankat City reminded me of Tashan – in spirit only; the two are poles apart in terms of sensibility – where the team appears to have had more fun tossing around zany ideas during scripting than while shooting. It’s all terribly clever – and also terribly exhausting.

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Posted in: Between Reviews, Cinema: Hindi