Zindagi Na Milegi Dobaara(2011): Some movie experiences can be summed up in a few lines.Others can take longer. This one would be hard to define . And to try to slot it or give it shape in any other form but the visual would take some doing.
The witticism ,of course , flows. With Farhan Akhtar around, what else can we expect? But the spoken lines(a brilliant fusion of the colloquial and existential) are so doggedly wedded to the visuals that we come away with a complete and satisfying cinematic experience, so replete with life’s most luscious home-truths that we want to carry the plot’s bumper-sticker wisdom in our hearts forever.
Farhan Akhtar did it ten years ago.in Dil Chahta Hai.He got three friends on the threshold of a career on a road-trip and let them come to terms with their own weaknesess and insecurities, even as Farhan, that wily filmmaker, discovered his own strengths as a storyteller.
Now it’s Farhan’s sister Zoya Akhtar’s turn to take that road trip. Some day we need to figure out the Akhtar siblings’ affinity to films about three male friends on a journey to self-discovery. Suffice it to say that Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (ZNMD)takes the theme of male bonding to a more illuminating plane than Dil Chahta Hai.
As the workaholic money-obsessed stock broker(Hrithik Roshan), the happy-go-looking-for-his-dad prankster(Farhan Akhtar) and the about-to-be-married-nice-guy(Abhay Deol) set out on trip through locationally lush Spain(ummm, full marks for seductive eyecandy visuals) we follow right behind.
Without trying to set up dramatic road-blocks and U-turns in the road journey, Zoya Akhtar gets us so involved in the drama and adventure of the threesome we gradually forget the actors and see only the characters that they so fluently and robustly play.
Oh yes, the ladies take the backseat. Nonetheless Katrina Kaif’s Laila, a gorgeous diving instructor who teaches Hrithik to dive into soul, makes such graceful space for herself among the boys that we wonder how she managed to make herself heard in a film that celebrates the spirit of male bonding in all its robust colour splendour and noise.
Oh yes, we forgot! This guys’ film is directed by a woman!The feminine touch is nowhere evident in Zoya Akhtar’s direction. She leaves you wondering if delicacy femininity and the opposite of a snobbish misogyny that our desi female directors have been seen to follow, vanished while we were not looking.
ZNMD is a coming-of- age film on many levels.It celebrates the sheer beauty and physicality of location and their deep connection to the characters’ state of mind, without apology or explanation. Trust me. I looked. I couldn’t spot even one unpleasant face or topogrphy in the entire length and breath of this beautiful film.
Yes, the surface is lovely. But so is the soul. Zoya, God bless her aesthetics,sucks us into the beauty of the moment, not giving us any reason to believe that life’s most precious truths are swathed in squalour. ZNMD celebrates splendour . Underwater or up in the air thousands of feet above sea level, the moments of tenderness are not stapled into the climate of camaraderie. They just happen.
The moment when Hrithik discovers love under the stars with Kareena, or when Farhan Akhtar finally meets his biological father(Naseeruddin Shah, in a naturally compelling cameo) or that breathtakingly blistered moment of reckoning when after a bout of male backslapping in the initial episodes, we suddenly realize the cause for friction in the Hrithik-Farhan friendship…These are masterstrokes of muted drama not written in to impress, but simply as an integral part of that journey which we undertake so enthusiastically and willingly with the threesome.
Technically the film wears its art on its sleeve. Carlos Catalan’s cinematography captures the pain and the fun in Spain without letting the touristic urge take over. Yeah, the film looks fetching. But not at the cost of the characters’ search for bearings in a world that mocks at the beauty of Nature.Editor Anand Subaya doesn’t cut the film. He carves the material in shapes that a jeweler would probably like to imitate if he only knew how.
What can we say about the performances without keeling over with gush? Every actor seems to the character born. Hrithik’s stuffed-shirt act would have been almost self-parodic were it not so sincere. Abhay Deol is a natural-born reactor. But it’s Farhan Akhtar who steals the best role, lines and moments. He is in his element and the character that evolves in the course of the journey.Oh yes, he gets to mouth his father Javed Akhtar’s evocative poetry. Genealogical advantage for a character that suffers just the opposite in the film.
Katrina Kaif’s Laila is a kind of synthesis of mystique and sincerity that we had seen long ago in Leela Naidu.This film marks the coming-of-age of the Kaif .Kalki in a relatively brief role brings a kind of snide cuteness to the proceedings. Her character is sometimes the brunt of ridicule. She takes it in her stride.
Every major character at some point, appears ridiculous. That’s the beauty of the askew world that Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s script tries to make sense with doses of humour and warmth.
In one of the many brilliantly-written sequences among the three boys Hrithik says one can’t escape one’s karma.The feeling we get watching this film is a queer blend of the karmic and the comic. The journey is so vibrant we can’t help feeling a sense of belonging with the characters.
Zindagi Milegi…is an exhilarating journey, an inspiring experience, a thought rather than a plot that glides with stunning smoothness and celerity. It has no real beginning or end. Just a series of handsomely and cleverly packaged episodes that are held together by the wisdom of a story-teller who doesn’t try to bully us into being attentive.The sheer inner and outer beauty of the film is enough incentive to keep us engaged till the final marriage before the end-credits.
I Am Kalam(2011): The boy is a dreamer. One look at the former President of India Abdul Kalam on television and Chotu decides to call himself Kalam. Kalam believes every child has the right to education.And never mind if the education-challenged child is a dhaba-worker like Chotu.
Without the least display of pity or preachiness debutant director Nila Madab Panda creates a world of infinite hope and minuscule joys for his precocious unlettered but smart protagonist Chotu. The wispy but firm-handed narration weaves through Chotu’s relationships with various characters in his life…his uncle the dhaba owner Bhatti(played with endearing warmth by Gulshan Grover) , the jealous Bachchan-crazy recruit at the dhaba Laptan(Pitobash,natural in his unsophisticated meanness), the free-spirited French tourist Lucy(Betarice ordeix), and above all, Chotu’s rapport with the Rajasthani royalty Ranvijay Singh(Husaan Saad) a kind lonely aristocrat boy who eagerly befriends Chotu to share his luxurious but solitary life with.
The shared moments between Chotu and his motley crew of compelling characters are tender and genuine.The characters are never slotted or allowed to become stereotypical. They convey a kind of free-flowing casualness that makes them real and yet dramatic in a subtle undefinable way.
The film’s social message of education-for-all is underlined but never italicized. It’s left to the boy protagonist Harsh Mayar to bring out the theme’s inherent message without making the plot heavy or didactic. Mayar with his unassuming swagger and artless smile brings to the film a rare intelligence and humour. National award, did they say? The boy deserves much more.
The first-time director tends to over-simplify the complexities of the plot towards the end when in a quest for a flashy climax he collects all the characters at an extremely manufactured crisis point.
The clumsiness of some episodes doesn’t take away from the film’s intrinsic warmth and gentleness. The narration glides through Chotu-Kalam’s adventures with ease and fluency creating the fantasy-driven hopeless world of an underprivileged child without pity of sentimentality.
The last shot shows the ‘Prince’ and the ‘Pauper’ traveling happily together in the same school bus.Socialism has arrived. Abdul Kalam must be smiling at this Utopian dream of finale. But then isn’t that what cinema does? Offer hope, create a dream world and exchange the harsh reality of the outside world with a magical alternative.
I Am Kalam does all of this. Must be watched for its sincere effort to carry forward the world of the child with the same mellow maturity of vision as the recent Stanley Ka Dabba and Chillar Party.
Rockstar(2011): Fatally flawed, Janardan Jakhar, aka Jordan(he gets the cool name from the love of his life) looks at life success fame and mortality as things that are not to be taken seriously…Until love strikes, he knows not when. Jordan only knows he needs to go with that elevating exhilarating bracing feeling of falling(and falling…)in love.
Fall, he does. In love, and in his allotted berth in the haul of fame. Most of the playing-time of this long deep profound and liberating exploration of love, operates on compelling life-defining clichés. Like the small-town boy who makes it big but looks at success with a contempt that he often spews in his physically offensive behaviour, barking and biting at the press, sniping at the people who try to love him,creating the drama of the damnded in a circle of frenzied self-annihilation, not always succeeding in making his point behind the contours of incoherence that Jordan has chosen to adopt as his habitat.
But here is the thing. Jordan works as a fatally-flawed creature of darkness and desperation because director Imtiaz Ali and his lead Ranbir Kapoor seem to have probed the protagonist without losing out on that vital quality that underlines every search for the a character’s core: the turmoil.
Ranbir plays Jordan by first accepting him as a flawed character and then taking him gently out of his comfort zone of clichés to play him with a rare blend of humour and passion. Once again Rockstar proves beyond doubt that Ranbir understands the craft of acting better than any actor of his generation.
Competition? Ha, what’s that! Ranbir takes Jordan through the perils and pitfalls of success with clichéd characters like the small-town benevolent manager(Kumud Mishra) ,the slimy music magnate(Piyush Mishra) and the sneaky television journalist(Aditi Rao Hyder) popping out of the woodwork(certifiable gleaming classy teak, of course) with a kind of peripheral assuredness that comes when you know the centre is sturdy and hundred percent reliable.
Ranbir finds his character’s centre, pulling it out of Jordan’s soul like a baby being brought into the world kickings screaming and protesting. It’s a performance that screams for attention and yet doesn’t really follow any formula of flamboyance to get attention.
Beyond the central performance Rockstar gives us desperately profound insight into the pitfalls of success and stardom. Jordan gets it all, shuns it and makes that final desperate lunge for love.He is Guru Dutt on cocaine.Devdas in a rock stadium.
Jordan’s love story with the beautiful free-spirited quixotic and quite gorgeous Heer(Nargis Fakhri) is the stuff legendary romances are made of. Lamentably Nargis misses the bus by a several miles, leaving her character with that anxious far-away look of a half-etched creation. Nargis is unable to merge into Heer’s liberated soul. Where Heer is destined to smoulder Nargis simply simpers.She tries, though. Hers is a good effort. But when you have the furiously fluent Ranbir as a co-star effort is not enough.
Nargis’ over-dubbed dialogues by the female voice which believes in driving in the point with several extra punctutation marks, doesn’t really help Nargis Fakhri get to the centre of her character.At the most, she stands at the edge looking in wonderously at Heer’s astounding graph from Delhi University’s “hottest” to a smothered wife and a dying lover-girl.
Rockstar is a multi-layered luminous look at a life that Jim Morrison, Guru Dutt and M F Hussain would have recognized . The passionate but pained pilgrimage of a musician from a small-town joke to global phenomenon is charted with delicacy and meticulous care. Time becomes an irrelevant and disembodied concept while defining Jordan’s troubled role as social misfit and an uncouth lover.
Anil Mehta’s camera moves through Delhi, Prague and Kashmir in search of a voice to the visual. We can almost hear the soul of these landscapes stretching their compelling drama into the souls of the characters.
Editor Arti Bajaj has cut the footage like a precious diamond. The sparkle never dazzles for display, though. No way! The feelings underlining the outstanding mise en scene are scattered across the valleys and streams of the film’s emotional landscape, lending to the work a rare and indeterminate beauty.
That most of the most outstanding sequences in Rockstar feature Ranbir is no coincidence. He is to this film what Rajesh Khanna was to Hrishikesh Mukherjee was to Anand .And what Jim Morrison was and is to Rock music.
You carry away images of self-annhilating stardom, of a love so deep long and strong that it makes Devdas’s passion for Paro seem like a cruised chapter.You carry away A R Rahman’s resonant rock-stadia sounds and Mohit Chauhan’s evocative pain-lashed vocals for Jordan.
Most of all you carry away that exhilarating feeling of having witnessed cinema that takes itself and its leading man to a new level of expressiveness.Rockstar is a spellbinding courageous coming-of-rage saga woven into a tantalizing tapestry of memory and angst and driven forward with demoniacal fury by Ranbir Kapoor’s centrally-heated performance. This is probably Imtiaz Ali’s best work so far.
