RAB NE BANA DI JODI / A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN - a refreshingly old-fashioned Bollywood romance

A few weeks ago I was praising DOSTANA for tackling contemporary sexual morality and pushing forward the boundaries of Hindi cinema. By contrast, RAB NE BANA DI JODI is a rather old-fashioned Bollywood weepie that espouses the virtues of integrity, loyalty and selflessness over hot dance moves and good looks. Both movies have their strengths and, in some ways, I rather preferred RAB NE BANA DI JODI precisely because it's a throwback to simpler, more straightforward times.

In contemporary Punjab, Surinder Sahni (Shah Rukh Khan) is a geeky, hard-working, quiet man. He attends the wedding of his professor's daughter, Taani (Anushka Sharma) only to fall in love with her at first sight. She's a vivacious, beautiful much younger girl - they seem to be chalk and cheese. When the groom party is killed in an accident, and the professor dies from grief, Surinder does the honourable thing in marrying Taani, giving her a home. He doesn't press his marital rights - rather waiting for love to grow slowly ("Haule Haule"). She promises to be a good wife, but claims she can never love him. In order to cheer her up and spend time with her, Suri decides to enter a dance contest with her, under the guise of a cool, confident guy called Raj. The make-over is so dramatic that Taani doesn't even recognise him. Soon, Taani is having a wonderful time with Raj. So much so that Suri is wondering if he'll lose her to his alter-ego. Or will Taani learn to appreciate Suri's quiet goodness? Well, this is Hindi cinema, so you can guess the ending!

The success of the movie hinges on the performances of the two leads. Shah Rukh Khan is marvelous as Suri/Raj. As Suri he is suitably self-effacing and nervous - and takes immeasurable delight in small triumphs - such as when his new wife prepares his first tiffin! As Raj, Shah Rukh beautifully satirises ridiculous Bollywood Heroes - complete with camp outfits and cheesy one-liners. Model slash actress Anushka Sharma does a good job in the harder role - she has to express the conflict of a well-brought up girl who considers leaving her husband for another man. Still, she doesn't have the screen presence of a Shah Rukh (who does?) or of legendary Bollywood actresses such as Kajol and Madhuri.

Behind the screen, Ravi K Chandran shoots Punjab beautifully and the Merchant brothers have produced a beautiful score. I particularly liked the sweet love song "Haule Haule" - nice to see Sukhwinder Singh singing a slower, softer number. And the lyrics to the song "Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai / I see God in you" are deeply moving. But by far the most entertaining and intellectually interesting number is a song called "Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte". It's a dream sequence in which Shah Rukh Khan sings himself through the history of Hindi film - pastiching the hit numbers of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. It's a tremendous set-piece - exuberant, cheeky but fundamentally nostalgic for a shared heritage. And if anyone's still in doubt about who really has the heart of India, wait for the reaction when the first "item girl" appears on the screen!

RAB NE BANA DI JODI is on global release.

RACE - the superficial

RACE is a fantastically superficial, depressing and boring Bollywood action thriller. The film is characterised by hyper-glossy women; self-conscious slo-mo action shots; an ear-threateningly loud score; and a penchant to shoot all the stars as if they were in rap videos.

The brothers Burmwalla are best loved for their hit movie CHORI CHORI CHUPKE CHUPKE but have significantly amped up the stunts and the sex scenes since then. In this film they concoct a ludicrous tale about two feuding brothers who are both the subject of $100m life insurance policies. The brothers and their accomplicies scheme and plot to kill, defraud, bribe and triumph. They are aided by two hot chicks, and held up by a comedy double-act of coppers. The plot has so many implausible plot twists that the audience is long past caring well before the end. Still, giving credit where it's due, unlike some convoluted thrillers, the Burmwalla brothers do manage to tie up every loose end.

As we go from plot twist to plot twist we're kept busy by fast-paced, western-influenced dance numbers; some action scenes and a bit of light relief. The dance numbers are universally poor, both in terms of the songs and the choreography. Fans of Bipasha Basu will find no hit song to match "Beedi" here. And Katrina Kaif as the second hot chick is, as always, wooden and lacking in true dance ability. The action scenes are ambitious by Bollywood standards but car chases have been done better in movies like DHOOM. And overall, KRRISH had a more high-quality tech-package than RACE. Which brings us to the light relief. Johnny Lever - veteran comic actor of Indian cinema - is outstanding in his five-minute cameo. And Anil Kapoor is decent as the Columbo style cop. I even liked Sameera Reddy as his idiot side-kick.

Still, I can't help but thinking that RACE is a step back for Hindi cinema. All style but no substance and the abasement of actors better known for art-house work. In particular it's a shame to see Saif Ali Khan, who was so outstanding as the Iago character in the brilliant OMKARA, posing like a rapper. It's a shame to see Bipasha Basu, who also made a breakthrough as a serious actress in CORPORATE, take a step back to steamy love-scenes and being just a "body".

RACE is on release in India and the UAE.

Beyond Bollywood - PAGE 3, CORPORATE & TRAFFIC SIGNAL

Madhur Bhandarkar is one of the best independent Indian directors currently working. He eschews the glitzy escapist froth of standard Bollywood fare and focuses on exposing the brutal reality of life in modern India. His films, PAGE 3 and CORPORATE exposed the corruption, venality and crass materialism of Indian high society and big business respectively. With TRAFFIC SIGNAL, Bhandarkar turns his attention to the life of street vendors who hawk goods and scam passers by.

PAGE 3 was originally released in 2005 to great acclaim thanks to the bravery of the subject matter, the outstanding central performances, the fast narrative pace and the accomplished hand-held camera-work from Madhu Rao. The movie focuses on an idealist young journalist (Bhandarkar regular, Konkona Sen Sharma) who gets assigned to writing the society gossip column of a major Mumbai newspaper by her editor (Boman Irani). She becomes a proxy for the audience as we are dazzled by the immorality of the film moguls. This is especially ironic in an industry that won't typically show kissing on screen. However, the most interesting strand of the film is seeing the impact of the corruption on the journalist herself - whether her own professional ambition will allow her to cross the paths of the powerful people she threatens to expose. It's a terrific film - one of the best Indian movies I've seen in the last ten years. It deservedly won the Filmfare Best Screenplay award for Nina Arora and Manoj Tyagi and Bhandarkar won India's Golden Lotus award.

Bhandarkar followed PAGE 3 with CORPORATE, released in 2006. Once again Bhandarkar teamed up with Manoj Tyagi to work up a fast-paced tightly plotted script exposing government corruption, corporate dirty tricks, chemical pollutants and sexual discrimination. Unlike PAGE 3 and TRAFFIC SIGNAL, the central female protagonist is played by Bispasha Basu, who looks rather unlikely as the ambitious young executive but turns in an okay performance. I also think the more conventional camera-work of Mahesh Limaye saps the film's energy. Still, CORPORATE is well worth checking out, though less accomplished than PAGE 3.

In 2007, Bhandarkar produced his latest film, TRAFFIC SIGNAL. Homeless kids, prostitutes, drug addicts, people who are simply poor....all pay protection money to a smart young man called Silsila, who in turn pays off a sinister mafia boss. At the top level, corruption stretches to "removing" an honest planning officer who refuses to move a fly-over that to suit the business needs of the local gang. TRAFFIC SIGNAL has the ring of truth and Bhandarkar adds authenticity by shooting mostly on location on the streets of Mumbai. Moreover, with the exception of Konkona Sen Sharma, most of the cast will be unfamiliar to audiences.

Is the movie up to the standard of PAGE 3? Arguably not. I don't understand why art films have to have music tracks that are badly lip synched by dancing cast members. More fundamentally, TRAFFIC SIGNAL lacks the underlying current of outrage and the narrative pace of PAGE 3. But then, PAGE 3 had an earnest, crusading journalist at its heart, and her outrage set the tone. By contrast, while TRAFFIC SIGNAL does feature a decent charity worker as one of its many characters, the central figure is the mafiosi middle-man Silsila. So it follows that the movie feels more like a hands-off documentary. Still, I must confess that the movie - structured around vignettes - meanders a little, and an hour in I wandered if anything really would happen. Having said that, for an audience unfamiliar with the harsh reality of street life in India, narrative weaknesses be damned: this is powerful viewing.

DHOOM 2 contains the most annoying character since Jar Jar Binks

The first DHOOM movie was a fantastic Bollywood popcorn flick. A charming buddy-cop movie in which Abhishek Bachchan's uptight policeman chases down John Abraham's motorcycle gang with the help of Uday Chopra's light-hearted buffoon-like street-kid. The movie combined some nice lo-fi motorcycle chase sequences, a pop soundtrack and some genuine chemistry between Abhishek and Uday. DHOOM 2 takes the basic ingredients for a successful franchise and amps them up to the point of stupidity. The feel-good charm of the original is lost in a sea of over-blown, poorly shot stunt sequences and slo-mo overload.

Unlike the original movie, DHOOM 2 has no narrative structure of character development. The producers clearly want us to judge it by the quality of the action and dance sequences. But even if we grant them this, the movie fails. The action sequences are a pastiche of John Wu meets The Matrix. They're edited to death - there is no fluidity or build-up of tension: the editing calls to much attention to itself. Moreover, even within the loose bounds of ridiculousness that we expect from stunt extravaganzas, the sequences have no internal logic. I *love* ridiculous stunts, but this movie was so absurd that even I couldn't suspend my disbelief. Worse still, every other shot is in slow motion! Seriously, if you just played this movie at normal speed it would be cut down from the over-long 3 hours to a more endurable 90 minute run-time. I half expected to see white doves taking flight. And don't even get me started on the quality of the Mission Impossible-style "wearing someone else's face" stuff....

Now back to plot and character or lack thereof. Actors are present to perform cool stunts and look buff to the point where Bollywood hero Hrithik Roshan has waxed his underarms. Sure, Hrithik and Bipasha look great and with this film, Hrithik has established himself as Bollywood's leading practicioner of Wire-fu and Hollywood-style stunt sequences. But you have to wonder at the self-respect of actors who exist merely as physical objects. Having seen Aish and Abhishek in UMRAO JAAN not two weeks ago and Bipasha Basu in OMKARA earlier this year, you can't help but feel that these actors are slumming it.

Aishwarya's character is especially annoying. She's meant to be a rebellious hip young MTV-watching kid. The writers achieve this by making her say, "like", after, like, every, word and like, making her, like, refer to herself, like, in the third person, like. Indeed, Aish's character may be the most annoying character since Jar Jar Binks. Abhishek Bachchan and Uday Chopra are cast into shadow by Hrithik. Of course they aren't helped by a script that turns their LETHAL WEAPON style sweet buddy-cop relationship into one of a grumpy critical superior and his idiot sidekick. And poor Rimi Sen gets about a nanosecond of screen time. It's obvious that the producers wanted to drop her for bigger female stars but couldn't quite write out the wife of the lead actor's character.

In the final analysis, DHOOM 2 is nothing more than a vulgar pastiche of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3. The producers have taken a promising franchise and skewered it with their vaulting ambition. Next time, let's hope that they funnel their attempts at Hollywood special effects and production values through a filter of plausibility and narrative structure.

DHOOM 2 is on release in the US, UK, India and the Netherlands.