Sultan: Of the Swing, Salman Rules.

10,000 hours at a minimum are invested in a field of choice before one becomes a master and a champion of it. Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book "Öutliers" drew this out as one of the conclusions from the data he analysed to decode success. 

Now why did this particular thought come to my mind as I silently walked out of the cinema hall after watching “Sultan”? Both I and my wife were quiet. It was an unexpected experience that had come our way. A Salman Khan movie released on Eid, had us emerging out of a cinema hall in stunned silence.

Salman belongs to an elite troika that has ruled the Hindi Cinema onscreen space over the past twenty years now. Never having been ever openly credited for knowing the craft or for his histrionic ability his notional equity commanded a lower price in the acting arena compared to Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan. Yet Salman Khan’s movies across his career have collected more money than those of the other two put together, who were a part of the supposed serious, mainstream projects. He is a star, loved by the masses, singularly handsome, and dated the most beautiful women in the world onscreen, his off screen image has a darker edge, that of a bad boy.  His off-screen antics from his early career have been the stuff that did not create happy stories and some took him to facing the law. There is also a different side to him in which he is known to help his co-stars, actors and other technicians that earned him the respectful sobriquet of bhai. From his debut in 1988 till 1992 he gave 5 solo super hits, this was the closest anyone came to Rajesh Khanna’s  record of delivering 15 back to back super hits from 1969-72. Then he meandered in his career, doing nothing meaningful yet his films made money till 2009. That year saw the rebirth of a Bollywood Colossus in him. "Wanted", was a Hindi remake of Pokkiri a Telugu film, directed by Prabhudeva , from this movie on one saw Salman taking command over the box office in a fashion that left every single peer, senior, junior gasping and miles behind. He defined the term a “100 crore” film. Consistently he has given 100's of crores of collections per film, each one of which has the typically front seater crowd whistling, howling and cheering for his action, romance and dances.

This though now was a different Salman Khan. He had taken charge, his performance, his understanding his commitment to every project grew by leaps and bounds and this attention reflected in his performance and films. His Rajveer Shekhawat to Chulbul Pandey are characters have stayed on in his audience’s memory. But with his legal cases, his oft quoted understood - misunderstood utterances and his more popular goofy cinematic image make him a soft target to be looked down upon by the select discerning audience. This same set had done it to Govinda years earlier and now it was Salman’s turn.

It was in this mindset we had entered the Cinema Hall to watch Sultan.

Sultan Ali is a townie from a village in Haryana and the movie opens in a wrestling pit. Sultan (Salman Khan ) has been a local legend in the past and a new recruiter Amit Sadh, trying to enlist him for the TV visual sport of MMA is aghast on seeing an old paunchy clerk in a government office. His queries to a friend of Sultan’s, unearths a story buried under the grime and sweat of a life in which he lived, loved and now seemingly looked like having lost. This was not an athlete in his prime who could be revived or could he? The wrestler has left the ring in memory of his paramour, Aarfa (Anushka Sharma) and as his friend joins the dots we take part in the romance of an impish Sultan. There in Sultan is a lot of heart, broken, bruised but ticking. This is what carries him on and the story leisurely moves on to its conclusion. 

Ali Abbas  Zafar, the director has a firm grip over the movie and it is the script that takes centre stage. It’s the treatment that separates this movie from the rest of what Salman has done. The story is the hero and the lovely lyrics by Irshad Kaamil the poet & lyricist its heroine. The romantic ballad "Jag Ghumiya" is so elegantly crafted by his pen that it will linger on for a long time.The fact that Salman himself lends his voice is just another raisin that I found in my biscuit. The dialect of the movie stays true to its location, is found in the songs too. Both the stars Salman and Anushka are & stay totally in character to deliver excellent performances. Their look is so beautifully designed, that both of them are believable completely.  The music by Vishal-Shekhar is rooted in the soil and the camera by Artur Zurawski the Polish Cinematographer makes love to the landscape and characters.

There is a genuineness ringing across the coin of Sultan the Movie with such a clear ring...it is amazing. The last time we had seen such an authentic energy and across the board genuineness was in Band Baja Baarat by Maneesh Sharma from the YRF’s stable. It is after that we see Ali Abbas Zafar hitting it out of the park in his third attempt at movie making after “My Brother Ki Dulhan”  and “Gunday”. Sultan shall allow him to take a bow for a movie well made. 

In a collaborative effort like making a film when all things fall into place, it is on account of everyone totally owning their work and roles. It is only on such rare occasions then that the movie watching experience becomes seamless and sublime. Everybody is outstanding and no one performance needs to be lauded. The man of the match is clearly the director and the team has won. The Kingdom is no longer King Khan's , it is a Sultanate now and there is but one SULTAN.

TE3N : South Korea to Kolkata, not much lost in translation

Kolkata is the new city of montages for the new age Hindi cinema. Look at the recent ones that have gone across our viewfinders and you shall get at what I am talking about. Kahani, Byomkesh Bakshy, Piku and now we have Te3n. 

No other city with the exception of Bombay actively interjects itself into the cast and script so wilfully like Kolkata making it special.

Te3n produced by Sujoy Ghosh and finding shape under the directorial baton of Ribhu Dasgupta is a good looking dark film. It is based on the South Korean film Montage and is officially a remake, with the copyright purchased. South Korean cinema has had unmentioned remakes earlier like the Sanjay Dutt starrer Zinda made from Oldboy. It is a different kind of cinema the South Korean one, and adapting it into the Indian ethos and milieu is a serious challenge. Ribhu Dasgupta has done a stellar job at this.

It all begins with a bang and an accident in sepia frames and the movie narrates itself 8 years later. John Biswas (Bacchhan, after Piku is officially now a screen Bengali, so natural is he at it )  loses a grand-daughter to a kidnapping and murder and is hounding the police for every single day of his eight years. The now cop in charge Vidya Balan, has empathy but no solution for the justice sought. The then veteran cop Martin in charge has also experienced the same deep rooted trauma of the crime and changes professions at the juncture of failure to become a priest. No clues are forthcoming and the case is stagnant and plateaued until a chance encounter with a baby girl unravels a thread for John. And while the thread unravels, there is a fresh crime. The MO is the same and the new cop seeks out the priest and his past expertise as a cop to crack the case. It’s a leisurely paced movie plot that deliberately tumbles itself towards a conclusion. Does John find justice, Do the police crack the cases form the fulcrum on which this plot is hinged.

The three back stories of the characters are neatly weaved in with some ends left deliberately or inadvertently open. There are more stories that intersperse and take over the narrative and make the plot more involved and complicated. 

Superb performances from Bacchhan and Sabhyasachi Chakraborty. Sabhyasachi is now finding himself as a default prop in every film that has Kolkata. 

Vidya Balan looks like a Mallu Chechi and tries to act like a young modern Bengali Bowdi who is also a cop. Someplace the cracks show up in the characterization and not in her performance. Same is the case with Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Father Martin. He is good but it is tough to digest him as the padre while easier as the padre who reverts to his cop giri. 

The camera is the final star who creates the ultimate Montage for Te3n and Kolkata shines through in its structural grandness, its fading and populated lively colourful milieu. The music is hummed prose lyrically metered by Amitabh Bhattacharya and set to tune by Clinton Cerejo. The music is unobtrusive, stays in the background and deepens the colour tone of the movie.

The pace of the movie is all Kolkata. It is languorous, slow, deliberate and garrulous sometimes more so in parts where one wishes for silence. 

This movie drives home the point that a new narrative flavour is definitely taking root in Hindi Cinema. This is seriously a welcome change.

Dil Dhadakne Do - A serious wake up call for Zoya

When a director makes a superb debut film, follows it up with a blockbuster hit road movie and has partnered on interesting projects then not only does she raise the viewing audiences expectations but also that of the producers, so what if they are family.

It is like the novelist who after having come out with a spectacular first book is paid a huge advance by the publishers for the upcoming one.

This can be serious pressure. The unexpected can happen too, like if the writer director hits a block on ideas and the delivery date is fast approaching. Then what does the think tank of this project do? Should they still go ahead and launch the project in its expected style ? This one does. Big names are roped in, given the prestige associated with the producers and the successful director involved; the budget also expands exponentially. But still the story idea does not emerge, so what next?

An earlier movie called Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd had a bus journey, the Think Tank searches for inspiration within the same base skeleton of that plot ( after all its their own production) and then they up the ante. The bus journey from Bombay to Goa now becomes a Luxury cruise between Turkey and Egypt. The pieces have begun to fall in place. Soon a screenplay emerges from the one liner that the director had begun this project with. And now what do we get?

We get a superbly packaged film that has a screen play, one that is a medley of scenes. In the process of building the scenes up, now even the one liner story plot is brushed aside and so if we keep searching for it its not a guarantee we shall find it now. Out of Zoya's previous two directed films, “Zindagi Na Miley Dobara” achieved commercial success. It was a great package because it cohesively was held together with exotic locales and a purposeful story that grew upon you as the movie progressed. The first one, Luck By Chance was a searing comment on the Hindi Motion picture industry , made with a lot of heart and hence the most honest of her work so far. ...

“Dil Dhadakne Do” like the title suggests is an entreaty to the viewing audience...please do bring your hearts to this movie because we didn’t put ours into it.

Farhan Akhtar with his cult debut Dil Chahta Hai introduced us to his world of the uber rich and it continues in most of the films produced by Excel Entertainment. Its an altogether special and different world; a world of cut glass and crystal. Here social butterflies bitch serenely over herbal teas and baba ganoush, while their hubbies play golf, have their flings on the side in distant locations and talk multiple billions with absolute impunity, offspring are but mere pawns in their business deals. When they rebel and show individuality, they are screamed at that they never had it so good because they were spawned by self made men. Three such screamers are Parmeet Sethi, Manoj Pahwa and the loudest of the loud (Kamal Mehra) Anil Kapoor. Notable among the wives is Kamal Mehra's spouse played by Shefali Shah. The Mehra’s to celebrate their 30^th Marriage Anniversary organize a cruise party. The impact that this cruise has on their two children Priyanca Chopra and Ranveer Singh and their love lives forms the crux of this film. 

What one can look for here if one has to go for this film...is of course the scintillating presence of Ranveer Singh & Anoushka Sharma, they are on fire and their auras grab eyeballs whenever they are on screen. Priyanca Chopra has done a splendid job as Ayesha and looks glorious in the fine clothes she gets to wear. Anil Kapoor is Anil Kapoor and the old dog hasn’t learned a single new trick. He still confuses raising the performance bar to increasing the sound decibel levels and that he does at regular intervals. The worst part is that he has been given the maximum screen time and this blunts the edge of the film. The other metabolic waste in this film is Rahul Bose. Small mercies is that he is accurately cast as the constipated chauvinist; his is the most exemplary of performances because he lives the part and brings it to life just by being. He does not act at all...why? Did someone consider the possibility that maybe because he just can’t? There is a dog Pluto who narrates the side stories. He sounds like Aamir Khan and on closer look even resembles the finicky star. Divya Seth has by now become the symbolic token of anything Delhi in a cinematic plot just like Victor Bannerjee once upon a time was of anything Bengal.

Ranveer – Anoushka – Priyanca keep the filmy ship cruising. The Anil Kapoor- Rahul Bose combo almost sinks it but the other characters in sheer numbers balance them out and prevent the mishap. Farhan Akhtar should get back to direction quickly, he is looking jaded and the thrill of being seen on screen is long gone, acting now definitely seems to not be his metier. Shankar, Ehsaan & Loy are uninspired.

Zoya needs to pull up her socks. What one feels when one comes out of the cinema hall is being short charged and quite arrogantly too. 

The product has been released and is now so in your face, god forbid if you don’t like it, because then you may even be brashly told it’s maybe too classy for you. 

This film is a wake-up call and hope she reads it well, because one doesn’t like to see ordinary stuff from talented directors. If it makes tonnes of money, that would make it even sadder. 

Piku : This Sircar Delivers

The Bengalis are back into Hindi Cinema and how? Dibakar Bannerjee had his Byomkesh Bakshi and now Shoojit Sircar releases Piku...the year couldn't have begun on a better note.

When one looks at Narendra Modi, a closer observation shows him up more like the Prime Minister of Gujarat than the Prime minister of India. Similarly the Hindi film industry had started looking more and more like an extension of Punjabi Cinema.  Now, I have nothing against the Punjabi language and culture, it’s great on its own but how much of Balle Balle and Shawa Shawa can one take? The way ahead had to be variety and not some one insisting "That's the way...Mahi ve". 

Shoojit Sircar has scored a hat trick. After his superb Vicky Donor and Madras Cafe, one had raised expectations of him in his next offering; a director who ideally married the art of telling a simple story simply into a commercial format and one who sated the sensibility of both the critic and the front benches. It is a huge ask. Very few film makers have managed to walk this golden mean...Sujoy Ghosh with his Kahani, Zoya Akhtar with her Zindagi Na Mile Dobara, Anurag Basu’s Barfi , Sircars own Yahaan, Vicky Donor and Madras Cafe, Sriram Raghavan with his Johnny Gaddar, Ek Hasina Thhi and Badlapur and the champion of them all Raj Kumar Hirani with all his films. Anurag Kashyap is another maverick but like his mentor Ram Gopal Verma quite inconsistent. Now you can see the dilemma that when one can capture all of such Hindi Cinema inside of one paragraph we have a crisis on hands. With Salman gone for a while the hundreds of crores shall come from Aamir, Shahrukh, Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgan...commerce never had a worry, sense had. The tragedy of Hindi cinema is that the industry has far smarter individuals than the products they dish out ; Dumbing down a product has become the default norm. 

Piku : The Movie

Not so with Piku, here Sircar takes us into the life of Piku and Bhaskar Bannerjee, a dysfunctional father-daughter pair. The father is an eccentric, constipated widower who has a penchant for linking every issue in the world with this particular bodily anomaly of his. 

Amitabh Bacchhan as Bhaskar Bannerjee shines after a long time in a role that he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed playing. 

Piku his daughter, is a smart young woman of the world who is in charge of their lives, completely submerged in the task of managing her own work, and a domestic life kept interestingly complicated by her eccentric father. Theirs is an interaction that is a delight to watch. Deepika Padukone has come into her own in selecting the right kind of cinema , one that raises her own bar of performance in the company of a vintage Bacchhan and the super savvy Irfaan Khan. 

Their lives are made fuller by the presence of her maternal aunt , Moushumi Chatterjee - superb, Raghubir Yadav extremely able as the family doctor and friend  & Jishu Sengupta as her working partner - credible . Into this life crashes Rana Chowdhary ( not a Bengali announces Bhaskar Bannerjee with the same dry cheekiness that he introduces his daughter Piku, not a virgin ) and thereon begins a journey from Delhi to Kolkata. In the simplicity of this story lies its elegance. Anupam Roy’s lyrics and music fits into and enhances the tapestry of the fabric of the film with gentle notes. The songs remain in the background but are profound.

"Dheere chalna hai mushkil, 

to jaldi hi sahi,

Aankho ke kinaro me 

bahane hi sahi
Hum chalein baharon mein, 

gungunaati raaho mein,

Khwahishein Anjaan hai, 

ab kya karein
Shabdo ke pahado pe 

likhi hai dastaan,

Khwabon ke lifaafo me, 

chhupaa hai raasta

Hum chalein baharon mein,

gungunaati raaho mein,

Dhadkanein bhi tez hai ab kya karein"

Piku is genteel cinema for the refined sensibility. The toilet humour just remains as the spice on the side while the characters grow on you in their journey. It is a charming little film and is a must watch for all. Amitabh is splendid but it is Deepika who holds the eyeballs every single time she is on screen. She delivers an absolutely riveting performance.  This is like driving all the way to Gariahat from Howrah to eat the fare at Bhojohori Manna...the experience is exactly the same, Sublime.  

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy - A Hilsa curry that used Pomfret

The detective template & early avatars of Byomkesh

Nearly fifty years after Arthur Conan Doyle penned the most replicated detective character template in Sherlock Holmes & Watson...the Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandopadhyay created Byomkesh Bakshy and Ajit in the milieu of Calcutta. Now Byomkesh in Saradindu babus short stories never addressed himself as detective. He preferred the term “Satyanweshi” or the truth seeker instead.  The same template was picked up by Satyajit Ray a few decades later in 1965 to fashion his Feluda , Topshe & Jatayu and detective fiction flourished in India with Byomkesh & Feluda leading the pack of popularity.

Feluda’s world was cleaner, what with Ray also being a film-maker. Maybe he thought in a cinematic perspective first and then the writing emerged, fashioning itself around that vision... on the other hand Saradindu babu was a sharp penman who had no such compunctions about the environment in which his detective resided...His pre-independence Calcutta is sordid, dark and has a seedy underbelly much like Conan Doyle’s London. This is the world that Dibakar Bannerjee successfully recreates...in bold colours and with superb detailing.

The interesting coincidence is that the first time the Satyenweshi breathed on screen was under the baton of Satyajit Ray the creator of Feluda, with Uttam Kumar as Byomkesh & Shailen Mukherjee playing Ajit in “Chiriyakhana”, the year 1967. Many other movies followed till Basu Chatterjee in 1993 & 1997 across two seasons adapted each of his 32 short novellas into a TV series with Rajat Kapur as Byomkesh & K K Raina as Ajit. Outside of Bengal,  this is the most enduring image of the detective.

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy – The Movie

Detective fiction readers are known to have short attention spans. Bandopadhyay with Byomkesh, wrote only short stories or novellas. For cinema then it becomes doubly imperative that the screenplay over the 120 plus minute period holds the audience enthralled throughout.

Bannerjee, here does something very interesting. He takes three separate stories from the author’s collection and picks the primary characters from them. Then he weaves all of them seamlessly into one plot while keeping the original flavour of the stories intact. This is the best part of the movie, it's screenplay by Dibakar Bannerjee & Urmi Juvekar. 

Ajit engages a fresh out of college Byomkesh to locate his father Bhuven babu and the story takes off, taking us along with the protagonists on a joy ride that is truly mysterious...wheels spin within wheels and the knotty situations don’t unravel easily...and this is the beauty of the screenplay, it keeps the viewer totally engaged. Byomkesh finds obstacles, love and adventure in his resolution of the larger plot that emerges out of the simple missing person case.

The music by Sneha Khanvalkar is psychedelic and adds a different dimension to the spectacularly bold visuals on screen. The 1940’s Calcutta recreated is simply superb...with attention to even minor detailing like film posters on walls. The support character cast of Anand Tiwari as Ajit, Swastika Mukherjee as the sensuous siren Anguri Devi, Meiyang Chang as Kanai Dao, Aryan Bhowmick as the dispensary boy  and Neeraj Kabi as Dr Anukool Guha are first rate and rise above their characters.They are the ones that lift the plot into another zone...the newcomer Divya Menon as Satyaboti wades through and manages to hang in there bravely, doing nothing much but look pretty.

There are several quirks and physical traits of Byomkesh Bakshi as sketched by  Saradindu  babu that have fit and been picked up by the varied actors who have played him earlier in the past ...right from Uttam Kumar, Sattindra Bhattacharya, Subhrajit Dutta to Rajat Kapur...they lived the role. 

No one but a Bengali director could have directed Byomkesh was a given, because the spirit of the ethos unless authentic would certainly have destroyed the fabric in Bandopadhyay’s tapestry. Here Dibakar Bannerjee is on the ball. Has Sushant Singh Rajput done a good job? If there existed no past comparative memory then, yes he is OK...But having read Bandopadhyay and seen earlier performances, now if asked again does Sushant  make a good Byomkesh...definitely no.

Dibakar attempted to cook up an Illish Maach ( Hilsa fish) curry , the spices are correctly ground and mixed and the curry looks and smells right...but when he was to drop the piece de resistance, the fish into the curry,  Aditya Chopra handed him a “Pomfret” instead of an Ilish.  At that very moment what may have been a possibly perfect dish went for a toss.  Someone may very well ask, so what is wrong with a Pomfret? Well...nothing, except that it is not an Ilish and hence quite simply doesn't cut the mustard .