THE HUNGRY - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

I cannot think of a Shakespeare play harder to adapt for modern audiences than his early melodramatic and arguably absurd TITUS ANDRONICUS. It's an over the top bloody revenge play set in ancient Rome, with very little by way of character development or nuance, and even the language is poor by his standards. I didn't even bother watching Julie Taymor's adaptation (although this also had something to do with previous bad experiences with her work).  That said, I was intrigued by the idea of a new version of the play set in contemporary New Delhi. If ever there was a setting that could perhaps capture some of the corruption and familial super-loyalty that the play demands, perhaps India could provide it.  But I am sorry to say that while writer-director Bornila Chatterjee's film looks beautiful and has a fantastic score (DP Nick Cooke and composer Benedict Taylor) - even more impressive on a micro-budget - the film did not capture my attention.  

The first interesting thing is that Chatterjee and her co-writers - Tanaji Dasgupta and Kurban Kassam - choose to jettison Shakespeare's language. Fair enough, one might say, given that it's not his best work, but that decision further exposes the thinness and absurdity of the plot.  There's a lot of justified condensing of characters too - which should make things more straightforward - except that the non-linear presentation and sometimes strange editing choices make it hard to follow again. 

The basic plot is that Tathagat (Naseeruddin Shah - wasted) is a powerful and corrupt businessman. Two years ago he killed his business rival's son and is now set to marry his own feckless son to his business rival's widow Tulsi (Tisca Chopra - very good).  Unsurprisingly, Tulsi has not forgotten the circumstances of her son's suspicious death, and with a loyal sidekick decides to use the wedding as a pretext for some murderous revenge.  It all goes wrong from the start.  Tulsi's newly arrived son Charrag (Antonio Akeel) viciously attacks Tathagat's daughter Loveleen before the wedding. This prompts a hasty cover up and search and heightens the tension. And let's just say things get bloodier and more incredible from there. 

The problem with THE HUNGRY - and indeed with Titus Andronicus - is that it's very hard to care about any of the characters when there actions are so selfish and seemingly futile.  Sadly Chatterjee has not been able to solve the flaw in the original play, and none of her central performances are magnetic enough in their sadistic violence to captivate.  In particular, the attempt to shift the focus from Titus/Tathagat to Tamora/Tulsi fails because Tulsi - as written - is too unknowable, distant, alienating. Still, I really did love the way the film looked and felt - at its best it reminded me of the dreamy-sinister school fund-raiser scenes in BIG LITTLE LIES - and I can't wait to see what Chatterjee does with more malleable and profitable subject-matter and a bigger budget. 

THE HUNGRY has a running time of 100 minutes. It played Toronto 2017.  There are still tickets available for the screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2017.

SHOOT ON SIGHT - poorly made, crude, political drama

SHOOT ON SIGHT is a poorly made, earnest but superficial film about the British police response to the post 9-11 terrorist threat. It's made by the team that brought us PROVOKED - another movie based in the British Asian community. It shares that film's ropey production values as well as its caricature about race issues in the UK.

The movie takes its inspiration from the de Menezes shooting, in which an innocent South American man was mistaken by British police to be a suicide bomber and was shot in a tube station just after the 7/7 bombings. However, in its ham-fisted way, instead of making the victim a South American clean-shaven man, they make him a caricature Orthodox muslim complete with kurta pajama and cap. The nervous police, as represented by Brian Cox, bring in a muslim cop (Naseerudin Shah) to investigate the case. Shah is a very fine actor, but his accent is all over the shop - from Cockney to Scouse - and this is extremely distracting. This being a simplistic, neat drama, obviously the copper's childhood friend just happens to be a fanatical mullah. And of course, wouldn't you just know that he's sponsored his nice young radical nephew to come and live in his loft-conversion?

Apart from Gulshan Grover and Om Puri (representing moderate and radical Islam), the performances are all weak. Crucially, there is no attempt to understand how the suicide bomber became a radical. Behind the camera, we have a shooting style reminiscent of cheap British soap operas and a score that is as subtle as a Bollywood melodrama.

If you want to see a movie about the pyschology and politics behind suicide bombing and the police response to it, you would do far better to watch the recent Indian art movie, BLACK AND WHITE. BLACK AND WHITE strives hard to prove that the issues are never really so binary, whereas SHOOT ON SIGHT never bothers with such nuances.

SHOOT ON SIGHT is on release in the UK.

KRRISH - state of the art Bollywood action flick

If you want to see the future of Bollywood, look no further than KRRISH - a slick, handsomely produced super-hero franchise that can rival anything Hollywood has to offer. Hrithik Roshan has watched Asian and Western action movies and sub-sumed the best of all worlds into a superlatively made movie that has the capacity to cross-over.

KRRISH is nominally the sequel to the sci-fi flick, KOI MIL GAYA. In that film, Hrithik Roshan played a disabled man called Rohit Mehra who is actually exceptionally gifted. Those gifts are unlocked when he and his love interest, played by Preity Zinta, discover an ET like alien called Jadoo. In KRRISH we fast forward twenty years. Rohit's son, Krishna Mehra, has inherited his special powers, but is living in seclusion with his grandmother (Rekha), after the death of his parents. He is lured to Singapore by a love interest (Priyanka Chopra) and creates a super-hero alter-ego called KRRISH. He battles against an evil super-villain, Dr Arya (Naseerudin Shah).

The first hour of the film is a classic, formulaic Hindi love story between Krishna and Priya. But the second hour sees the emergence of Krrish and wire-fu stunt choreography the like of which has never been seen in Hindi cinema. Hrithik Roshan has obviously been training hard and he has obviously hired the best technicians available, not least, Tony Ching Siu of HERO and THE CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER fame. The final hour is pure Superman style good versus evil stuff. Enormous fun and brilliantly executed.

KRRISH went on global release in 2006 and is now available on DVD.

The cinema of Nagesh Kukunoor.

My recent post on the Madhur Bandharkar's Mumbai trilogy, led me to reconsider my experience of Indian art-house cinema and prompted this post on the recent cinema of writer-director-actor Nagesh Kukunoor. They are two complementary directors. Bandharkar's cinema seeks to expose corruption at the very heights of Indian society. He uses fast cuts, hand-held cameras and the brash confrontational structure of investigative journalism. The over-riding tone is angry. By contrast, Kukunoor's cinema deals is more quiet, more personal, more sentimental and less polished.

Kukunoor's first film was his incredibly lo-fi 1998 feature, HYDERABADI BLUES. He plays the protagonist - a young Indian man who returns home after a decade in the US and finds himself bewildered by the traditional process of wooing a wife. Kukunoor shows his flair for comic dialogue and for creating authentic emotional dilemmas. But the film falls down for its ridiculous denouement and the rough-and-ready technical spec. So this is arguably an interesting movie for fans of his later work, rather than a must-see for general audiences.

Kukunoor's next movie was the 1999 coming of age tragicomedy, ROCKFORD. It's about pre-teen boys in an Indian all-boys Catholic boarding school. Kukunoor captures the dramas of growing up in a strict environment, friendship and first love with candour and wit. But this is a less successful film that HYDERABADI BLUES. Although filmed on a larger budget, the editing and framing still have a haphazard feel. The plot was a bit random too. Big issues, such as sexual abuse, are introduced and then neatly dismissed. And the lead actors, young Rohan Dey and Nandita Das give mediocre performances.

Next up is the 2001 satire on Bollywood, BOLLYWOOD CALLING. Pat Cusick plays himself - a failed Hollywood actor who decides to take bit part in a Bollywood movie directed a has-been played by the legendary Om Puri. Once again, the technical package ratchets up a notch in this flick, though far from perfect. Still, it was a testament to Kukunoor's increasing success that he managed to cast Om Puri. The script is especially good on the culture clash between East and West and in lightly mocking the intrinsic ridiculous of the Bollywood masala movie. But there is no rage and no anger - no exploration of the darker side of an industry with mafia links and a bad track record on sexual abuse. Instead we get a very schmaltzy denouement where, once again, all loose ends tie up neatly and in the best of all worlds. I mean, you don't have to make a movie as fierce as PAGE THREE, which is less a satire than a rant. But, BOLLYWOOD CALLING isn't half as perceptive, accomplished, visually inventive or tragicomic as Merchant Ivory's 1970 classic, BOMBAY TALKIE, for instance.

2003 brought a turnaround in Kukunoor's career, as far as I am concerned. With the dark thriller 3 DEEWAREIN (3 WALLS) he made a movie of real emotional depth and political importance. It is powered by surprisingly good performance from mainstream Bollywood actors - Jackie Shroff, Juhi Chawla and Gulshan Grover - as well as a typically brilliant performance from Naseerudin Shah. The movie opens with a no-nonsense depiction of three murders. We then move forward in time. Chawla plays an abused housewife who is interviewing three convicts on India's death row. They are played by Shroff, Shah and - in an absurd lack of humility on his part - Kukunoor. The thriller aspect arises from why exactly the woman is so interested in these men. The tension builds - there are no silly songs to destract from it - until a powerful and uncharacteristically dark denoument. The result is an accomplished and powerful film that breaks the Bollywood mould and is definitely worth trying to watch. Indeed, the only real flaw is Kukunoor's reluctance to cast a better actor than himself in a lead role.
After such a promising film it is disheartening to say that in 2004, Kukunoor released a flimsy cash-in - HYDERABADI BLUES 2. The least said about this mediocre feel-good nonsense the better. But things went from bad to worse with the admittedly critically acclaimed 2005 schmaltz-fest IQBAL. This is a polished, emotionally manipulative, hackneyed underdog/sports movie. Picking up from the plucky young things in LAGAAN, here we have a deaf-mute boy who triumphs over his family's objections to play for the Indian cricket team having been talent-spotted by no less a legend than Kapil Dev! Seriously.

But before we can write off Kukunoor as a Bollywood Spielberg-lite, he flip-flops back to form with this 2006 flick, DOR. Ayesha Takia plays a naive and kind-hearted Hindu girl called Meera who marries her childhood sweetheart. She lives with his highly traditional (for which read patriarchal and oppressive) family while her husband leaves home to look for work in a factory. But soon they receive the news that the husband is dead. He was apparently pushed from a balcony by his room-mate, a Muslim man from north India. Meera is now a young widow - at the lowest rung of the social ladder - and kept as a quasi-slave in her husband's house. Still, she does not object to this until she meets a North Indian woman called Zeenat (Gul Kirat Panang). Zeenat is a feminist Muslim who teaches her to have some fun and think for herself. However, Zeenat has a hidden agenda. Her husband has been convicted of killing Meera's husband and the only way she can save him from the death sentence is to persuade Meera to pardon him.

The movie is beautifully filmed and shows the difference in landscape, culture and customs of Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan. DP Sudeep Chatterjee does excellent work. The script and the two lead performances are also praise-worthy. In particular, Meera's awakening is subtle and convincing. All in all, DOR is a quiet, patient, lyrical film that, along with 3 DEEWAREIN, makes Kukunoor a director that it's hard to dismiss.

All these films are available on DVD.

OMKARA - stunning Indian Othello

OMKARA is a stunning new version of Othello. It is set in a rural outpost of contemporary India where elections are determined by political hooligans - bribes, assassinations and threats. In this world of inverted morality, Omi (Othello) is a powerful man, second only to Bhaisaab (Brabanzio). These men wield so much power that Bhaisaab can have a public train stopped and run back to the station it has long since left because Omi needs to get off and perform a task. However, in a move as improbable as the Shakespeare play, Omi - the low-born, half-caste, thug, habitually dressed in black - attracts a young, innocent, well-born girl called Dolly (Desdemona). She leaves her family to live with Omi even before they are married much to eveyone's shock, not least Omi. Even his sister Indu (Emilia) laughs at his good fortune. Indu is married to Omi's second-in-command, the scheming bastard, Langda Tyagi. At least, Tyagi thinks he's second-in-comand until Omi complacently hands this role to the dashing womaniser Kesu (Cassio.) Kesu will deliver more rigged votes, and Omi foolishly believes that Tyagi will "understand". So begins the Shakespearian tragedy. The morally bankrupt Tyagi sets out to put Omi in a murderous, jealous rage - using his unwitting wife Indu to frame Dolly for sleeping with Kesu.

The movie is co-adapted, scored and directed by Vishal Bharadwaj and he deserves much praise. He has created a movie of rare intelligence and beauty. The camerawork is fluid without calling attention to itself. The production design is stunning - India is all rugged hills, dust, dirt and cell-phones. The music makes good use of Sukhvinder Singh's unique voice. Admittedly, I do not think the two "item numbers" featuring Bipasha Basu as the lewd dancer in a road-side inn can compare to last year's hit from BUNTY AUR BABLI, Kajra Re. However, the love song O Saathi Re is absolutely beautiful. I loved the script with its fiercely crude language and occasional flashes of dark humour. And most of all, I loved the acting performances. All these actors have form - appearing in small budget art movies alongside the bigger budget Bollywood hits. Ajay Devgan (Omi) was remarkable in RAINCOAT. Kareena Kapoor (Dolly) showed her range in CHAMELI. Saif Ali Khan (Tyagi) and Naseerudin Shah were hysterical in BEING CYRUS. Finally, Konkona Sen Sharma showed her class in last year's PAGE THREE.

I have a couple of quibbles with the precise details of the adaptation of the ending, for which read on underneath the release date stuff. Other than that, if you have two and a half hours to spare and fancy a thorough work-out of heart and mind, you should check OMKARA out.

OMKARA is currently on cinematic release in the UK, US and India.

Spoiler alert.....

Okay, so there are two major departures from the source material. The first is that the Othello figure doesn't start off as a great and noble general with stories of the wars with which to dazzle Desdemona. He's a crook. This makes the already improbable love even more improbable. It also means the tragedy is not your classical fall from grace kind. I mean, Omi is no scumbag. He always intended to marry Dolly not just to have his way with her. But he is no Great Man fallen. I suppose his tragedy is that he only becomes noble after murdering his love: in leaving Tyagi alive. My other niggle is that while I loved that the female characters are a lot more feisty in Omkara than in Othello, why does Indu have to kill Tyagi? It makes the ending of the movie rather neater than the play, which to my mind contradicts the gray-scale morality of the piece. This should not be about apportioning blame neatly. In the Shakespeare, Iago stabs Emilia and then absconds, to be caught and brought back in by the Law. Othello has a swipe at him, but Iago is left to face the courts, vowing never to speak again. I rather liked that. The innocent is dead, the murdering husband a suicide, but evil exists still.

BEING CYRUS - truly funny, very bizarre, Bollywood thriller

So, this movie came out of left-field. BEING CYRUS is a fantastic new movie made largely by members of the Hindi film industry. It combines hysterically, typically Indian humour with Western production values and has a style all of its own. There are no dancing girls, "item numbers", or hackeneyed star-crossed lovers storylines. We also do not have that particularly sickening aspirational unreal depiction of ex-pat life that so many Bollywood multiplex films contain. (I am thinking here of HUM TUM, KAL HO NAA HO etc.) Instead we have an odd-ball thriller. Yes, yes, here we have that rare thing: a Hindi movie that has us crying with laughter, but also requires some intelligence to figure out the plot, and is all wrapped up within 90 minutes!

Cyrus Mistry is a young man who, together with his sister, had a miserable childhood as an abused orphan. In adult life he becomes an apprentice to a sometime celebrated, but now pothead recluse sculptor, named Dinshaw Sethna. This crumpled romantic is married to a fading and frustrated beauty called Katy, who dreams of quitting their "bhoot bangla" ramshackle country villa in Panchgani and returning to life in Bombay. Katy sends Cyrus on a mission to Bombay to sweet-talk Dinshaw's rich but ill-treated father, Fardounji Sethna, at which point he also comes into contact with Dinshaw's fat, capitalist brother Farouk and his young bride, Tina, not to mention, through twists and turns of the plot equally absurd and hillarious, Police Inspector Lovely.

The film has an outrageously funny script penned by first time writer-director Homi Adajania. I usually hate voice-overs but Cyrus' narrative is sharp, witty and memorable, and much praise must be given to Saif Ali Khan, up till now a conventional Bollywood heart-throb, for pulling off such a role. In addition, the supporting cast is superb. We have Naseerudin Shah - a class act - playing Dinshaw with such subtlety. With a flick of his eyes in an interrogation room he can reduce us to hysterics. Dimple Kapadia sends herself up as Katy, Honey Chayya is wonderful as Papa Fardounji, and best of all, we have the Peter Sellers of Indian cinema, Boman Irani, as the explosively bad-tempered Farouk.

But this is not just a funny, well-plotted movie. The depiction of Indian life is also spot on - from the people sleeping on park benches or on the road side in practically every frame; the road-side arguments between residents in the apartment building; to the way in which as you sit down in the cafe you immediately get served a cup of warm chai. Small details, but rarely seen in the glammed up dream-world of Bollywood movies. The director also uses the camera with imagination and fluidity to great comedic and dramatic effect - everything from bizarre Lynch -like dream sequences to dog POV shots. Finally, the film is greatly enhanced by Brit, Jon Harris, and has a faint air of the comedy freeze-frame stuff we saw in SNATCH.

What it all boils down to is that you should not dismiss BEING CYRUS because it is a Bollywood movie. The best way to think of it is as an English-language black comedy/thriller that is set in India. TRANSAMERICA may be more worthy, but I'd be hard pushed to recommend anything funnier on UK screens this weekend.

BEING CYRUS opened in India, Dubai and the UK on March 24th 2006.