Bachna Ae Haseeno

Bachna Ae Haseeno (Beware, Beauties; 2008) is an enjoyable time-pass, as they say, but it could have been more. The premise--a man seeking out past girlfriends in order to apologize for his caddish behavior--seems promising. Alas, somewhere between Aditya Chopra's story and the realization of the film, something goes amiss.

(As an aside, the title of the film is taken from an R. D. Burman song for the film Hum Kisi Se Kum Nahin (1977), which starred Rishi Kapoor--father of Ranbir Kapoor, the male lead in Bachna Ae Haseeno. Ah, Bollywood...)

Warning: some spoilers follow.

We see Raj (Ranbir Kapoor in a far more assured and enjoyable performance than in his debut Sawaariya (2007)) romancing three women at different stages of his life. First there's the naïve Mahi (convincingly played by Minissha Lamba), whom he meets during a pre-college Eurail tour. The parallels to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)--coincidentally written and directed by Aditya Chopra--are underlined explicitly (not to say relentlessly). Like DDLJ's Simran (Kajol), Mahi dreams of being swept off her feet by an irresistible romance, but in reality will be returning to India for an arranged marriage. Unlike DDLJ's Raj (Shah Rukh Khan), though, Raj doesn't follow her. Instead he brags to his buddies about how far he's gotten with Mahi during the 24 hours they spent together after missing the train. Mahi overhears his boasting, and her dreams of romance are shattered.

Six years later, Raj is in his mid-twenties and is living in Mumbai with aspiring model Radikha (Bipasha Basu; I've never been Bipasha's biggest fan, but she does a creditable job here). When Raj and his game-design partner Sachin (Hiten Paintal) win a coveted posting to Sydney, Radhika plans for a wedding on the eve of what she assumes will be her departure with Raj. But Raj, panicking at the thought of commitment, lies to her about when he's leaving. Radhika is left waiting at the altar as Raj and Sachin jet off to Sydney.

Six years after that, Raj--now the thirtyish head of a highly successful game-design team--has obviously been enjoying the hedonistic nightlife of Sydney to the hilt. But then a late-night encounter with gorgeous taxi driver/convenience-store clerk/MBA student Gayatri (the stunning Deepika Padukone) has Raj suddenly rethinking his aversion to commitment. Gayatri, though, is a smart and determinedly independent woman who isn't ready for marriage and refuses to be kept by Raj. It's refreshing to see a female character in a Bollywood film for whom marriage isn't the supreme goal, and who can go to bed with a man she's attracted to without getting punished by the screenwriters.

Instead, it's Raj who is hurt when he unwisely decides to push the marriage issue, and gets a bitter taste of his own medicine. He then decides that he has to make amends to Mahi and Radhika for his past cruelties. He's in for some surprises, though...

On the plus side, the actors are all appealing, the locations (Switzerland, Bombay/Mumbai, Sydney, Italy, Thailand and Amritsar) are beautifully shot by director Siddharth Anand, and Vishal-Shekar's music (apart from the wretched English-language rock soundtrack that crops up repeatedly in Sydney) is catchy, especially Raj and Gayatri's "Khuda Jaane" (sung by Krishna Kumar Kunnath and Shilpa Rao):

But the Curse of the Second Half strikes Bachna Ae Haseeno in a major way. Disbelief has to be suspended past the breaking point, odd compressions and expansions of time occur (when Raj returns to India to find Mahi and Radhika, reference is made to a "4 days/3 nights" package; it turns out later that he's been gone a full year!), and there are multiple undermotivated reversals.

Despite the increasingly unconvincing script in the second half, Bachna Ae Haseeno is worth watching for the performances, especially those of Deepika, Minissha and Ranbir, and for the eye-candy. Beyond that, keep your expectations in check.

Chashme Buddoor

Thanks to Memsaab's rave review we watched Chashme Buddoor (1981) the other night, and it's every bit as delightful as she makes it seem.

Chashme Buddoor (a loose translation might be "Knock on Wood") is a bit like a comic La Bohème. It's the story of three roommates and their attempts to woo the girl next door, Neha (the terrific Deepti Naval). There's the poet Omi (Rakesh Bedi), the would-be actor Jai (Ravi Baswani), and Siddharth (Farooq Shaikh), a bookish economics graduate student. They share a cramped flat, and are constantly in hock to the local paan-walla, cigarette and soda vendor Lalan Mian (Saeed Jaffrey). Both Omi and Jai go to Neha's house to try to impress her; both fail miserably, but return to their buddies with elaborate stories about how successful they were. Finally, Siddharth is home one afternoon when Neha comes to his door--she's doing laundry-detergent demonstrations, and only needs to do one more to fill her quota. Over the suds, they begin a shy courtship, which eventually blossoms into love.

Chashme Buddoor is full of moments that gently mock filmi conventions. When Siddharth and Neha are sitting together in the park, she points out that they should be doing a song-and-dance number. Then, glancing around at all the couples and families that surround them, she wonders how it is that in movies when the hero and heroine dance in the park it's completely empty. Yes, Siddarth muses--and where do they hide the 40-piece orchestra? In another scene, the couple is sitting in their favorite cafe, and ask the waiter for another round (Tutti Frutti ice cream for her, coffee for him)--but, Siddharth tells him as they linger together, please take your time. Fine, the waiter replies--I'll bring it after the interval (which then arrives on cue).

The humor mainly depends on the observation of telling details rather than slapstick, and there's a hilarious montage of great movie love songs restaged as Jai's fantasy date with Neha. One key factor in the film's success is that all of the actors are perfectly matched to their roles. The boys aren't chiseled gym bunnies, and Neha, though lovely, isn't a Miss World contestant inexplicably parachuted into a typical Dehli neighborhood. I'm curious now in particular about Deepti Naval and Farooq Shaikh--I'll have to explore a bit more of their filmographies.

The course of true love never runs smooth, and for their own selfish reasons Omi and Jai decide that they have to break up the couple. There are some lapses in narrative logic, and in the last 20 minutes the director/writer Sai Paranjape abandons his her filmi satire and stages an almost conventional masala climax. But by then Chashme Buddoor has built up so much good will that it's easy to forgive this minor lapse (and don't stop watching before the credits roll.)

You don't have to take my word for how enjoyable this movie is, though. If you haven't seen it I urge you to read the reviews of Memsaab and Beth (which I discovered as I was writing this), and then run out to rent the movie. You'll be utterly charmed.

Zubeidaa

Based on the story of writer Khalid Mohamed's own mother, Zubeidaa (2001) tells of her unhappy life and untimely death in the early years of India's independence. Zubeidaa's story is framed by the attempts of her adult son Riyaz (Rajit Kapoor) to investigate decades later the life of the mother he barely knew.

Warning: spoilers follow.

Zubeidaa (Karisma Kapoor in an excellent performance) is buffeted by forces she doesn't understand and can't control. First her traditionalist Muslim father (Amrish Puri), himself a filmmaker, forces her to give up her aspirations to be a movie actress and marries her off unwillingly to the son of a family friend. The marriage scene, where a grimly silent Zubeidaa refuses to give her assent and her father speaks for her, shows that even the possibility of defiance is denied to her.

A year later, Zubeidaa's husband is convinced to divorce her and return to Pakistan with his father (the authority of fathers can't be contested even by their sons, it seems). Zubeidaa is left with a baby boy and the stigma of being a divorced mother. But to her parents' dismay, she isn't content to spend the rest of her life sequestered at home. At a polo match she meets Maharaja Vijayendra "Victor" Singh (Manoj Bajpai), who after the proverbial whirlwind courtship takes her to Fatehpur to be his second wife. Zubeidaa's short-lived joy is dashed, though, when her father insists on keeping her son, despite Victor's assurances that Riyaz can be raised as a Muslim.

Zubeidaa's romantic fantasies soon collide with the realities of Victor's relationship to his first wife, the Maharani Mandira Devi (Rehka), who is Hindu and the mother of his sons. Zubeidaa chafes under the precedence Mandira must be given and the time that Victor must spend with her. And when Victor decides to contest the provincial elections, he tours the villages with his Hindu consort, and not his Muslim wife.

The film touches on many issues: women's lack of freedom, the wounds of Partition, the second-class status of Muslims in a Hindu-dominated society, the attempt by the post-Partition Indian government to disempower the hereditary ruling classes, the conflict between the traditional and the new. The treatment of these issues by Mohamed and director Shyam Benegal is unusually subtle; there are no heroes, villains, or melodrama, only ordinary people acting out of comprehensible, if sometimes hypocritical or cruel, motives.

Much credit is due to Mohamed, Benegal and the actors for the many telling moments in the film. When Zubeidaa and the Maharani first meet, Mandira criticizes Zubeidaa's sleeveless choli; it's clear to us and to Zubeidaa that although Mandira reluctantly accepts Zubeidaa's presence, she's jealous of her place in Victor's affections. Yet, the next time we see Zubeidaa she has silently changed into a more demure style--her begrudging concession to Mandira's authority within the household. Later, when an angry Zubeidaa creates a scene at the airport by insisting on being taken on what turns out to be a fatal plane flight in place of the Maharani, Mandira's shame and humiliation are expressed in a single lowered glance at those gathered to see them off. The nuanced acting and directing are matched by A. R. Rahman's typically superb score.

The problem with Zubeidaa is its heroine. While her unwillingness to be limited to her traditional roles gains our full sympathy, that sympathy is slowly eroded by her displays of willfulness, childishness and petulance throughout the film. Her rebellion remains little more than simmering resentment that occasionally explodes into fits of pique. In fact, it's suggested that she may have deliberately caused the plane crash that took her life and that of her husband, a suspicion only partly dispelled in the film's final moments. We wait in vain for Zubeidaa to recognize that anything other than getting her own way might be at stake--to grow up, to put it bluntly. She is ultimately a victim not only of a patriarchal society, but of her own self-centeredness.

And so despite the many pleasures that this intelligent and well-acted film offers, Zubeidaa's limitations make Zubeidaa ultimately somewhat unsatisfying. Still, it is very much worth seeing, and makes me curious about the two other semi-autobiographical films on which Mohamed and Benegal collaborated, Mammo (1994) and Sardari Begum (1996).

Slumdog Millionaire at the Oscars

The day after Slumdog Millionaire's eight wins at the Academy Awards is a great time to revisit Bollyviewer's hilarious imaginary dialogue between Danny Boyle and 1970s masala-master Manmohan Desai.

And am I correct in noticing that in his acceptance speech for Best Director, Danny Boyle did not thank his cast? And that in his acceptance speech for Best Picture, producer Christian Colson said "This was a film with no stars," while Anil Kapoor and Irrfan Khan were standing behind him onstage?

Still, it was great to see music director A. R. Rahman, sound mixer Resul Pookutty, and the enthusiastic cast enlivening the proceedings (image © Amy Sancetta/Associated Press).

U Me aur Hum

The late David Foster Wallace wrote a hilarious essay about taking a luxury cruise on a ship he rechristened the Nadir. You can still read it in the online Harper's Magazine under its original title "Shipping Out"; it was later published as the title essay of his nonfiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Little, Brown, 1997). Here's a representative sample:

"The promise [of cruise-ship advertising] is not that you can experience great pleasure but that you will. They'll make certain of it. They'll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. You will be able--finally, for once--to relax, the ads promise, because you will have no choice."

So a release from everyday reality and an escape from the burden of memory could be said to be the very purpose of a cruise. Or, as Wallace quotes from the cruise line's "positively Prozacian" brochure, "Just standing at the ship's rail looking out to sea has a profoundly soothing effect. As you drift along like a cloud on water, the weight of everyday life is magically lifted away, and you seem to be floating on a sea of smiles."

How fitting, then, that large chunks of U Me aur Hum (You, Me and Us, 2008), including its framing story, take place on a cruise ship. The movie recounts the saga of Ajay (Ajay Devgan) and his love for Piya (Kajol), a cruise-ship waitress who becomes a victim of (spoiler alert!) a Tragic Disease: early-onset Alzheimer's. Really early--Piya seems to be in her mid-20s in the flashback scenes (Alzheimer's symptoms are rarely detectable before age 60).

But this isn't the only stretch of the imagination the film requires. (More spoilers follow.) For one thing, Piya's symptoms come and go--she's capable of executing a seductive song and dance ("Saiyaan") for husband Ajay one minute, and then forgetting she's put the baby in the bathtub the next. (What is it with drowning-baby scenes? Heyy babyy (2007) also had a highly disturbing one.) In fact, when we first see Piya--in the present day, more than two decades into this inexorably degenerative disease--she's reading a thick paperback novel, and she listens attentively to Ajay's lengthy narration as he recounts how they met and fell in love on a cruise 25 years previously. She has no trouble remembering the plot and characters of a 700-page novel or following Ajay's story, but she can't recognize her husband of more than two decades? This movie needed to hire Oliver Sacks as a consultant.

The flashbacks are no more grounded in any sort of recognizable reality than the present-day scenes. Ajay is supposed to be a high-powered psychiatrist, but somehow he can't diagnose the dementia symptoms in his wife. And apart from some unconvincing aging by makeup in the present-day scenes, no effort has been made to suggest the passage of time: in the flashback scenes, none of the clothes, hairstyles, or music seems to date from the early 1980s. (Were cruise ships filled with blonde Russian pole dancers back then? Just asking.)

Wallace reported: "I don't think it's an accident that 7 N[ight] C[aribbean] Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don't mean decrepitly old, but like fiftyish people for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration." But--surprise!--most of the bodies on display in U Me aur Hum belong to an army of lithe young actor-dancers, who of course just happen to be taking a cruise together.

But I can deal with lapses in logic and a certain degree of unreality: this is Bollywood, after all. The flaws in this movie are deeper (or perhaps I should say shallower). Basically everything about U Me aur Hum and the dilemmas of its characters rings false, and so the big emotional moments are flat and uninvolving. This was a project conceived, produced, and directed by Ajay Devgan, and so there's not a lot of ambiguity about who to blame for its failures.

The main redeeming feature of the movie is Kajol, who seemingly can't give a bad performance, even of a character whose Tragic Disease has been rendered completely unbelievable by the scriptwriters. Not only that, she's looking great. In some of the cruise ship scenes, when she's out in the bright sunshine, you can see that she's now developing tiny, endearing, sexy laugh lines at the corners of her extraordinary eyes. Kajol is one of those fortunate mortals who just looks better than ever as she gets older. And since she's onscreen for most of the film, she keeps it from being a total loss--there are certainly worse ways to spend a couple of hours. But in the end watching U Me aur Hum was all too much like Wallace's cruise: it was only supposedly enjoyable, and I'm not tempted do it again.