ONE of the things you’re sometimes asked as a critic is: How do you decide when to tear a film apart from limb to sorry limb, and when you’re going to give it a considered appraisal, even if that appraisal may end up unfavourable? One of my rules of thumb is simply that a good movie draws you in. You can feel it in your gut, when a film has been made with a respect for the craft and the consumer.
In such cases, the “mistakes” you find are either a result of personal taste — namely, I may not care for an actor, or a certain style of staging — or perhaps the filmmaker has slipped up along the way, either because funds weren’t available, or the right cast wasn’t obtainable, or he was too locked into his own vision, or he was forced to engineer a compromise between his artistry and the arm-twisting of the marketplace.
Whatever the excuse, when such a film doesn’t entirely work for you, there’s no reason for condescension. All you need to know (and feel) is that (a) someone tried, and (b) your time was respected. That’s really all it takes for me to begin thinking along the lines of a considered appraisal.
There are icky offshoots to this approach, of course. You could ask, “What about the audience, to many of whom the only consideration is entertainment, the satisfaction of money well spent?” I cannot disagree. I suppose that’s when you stop reading me and pick a critic who thinks accordingly, and I suppose there are going to be critics who think Neeraj Vora’s Short Kut — The Con is On (based on the Malayalam blockbuster Udayananu Tharam) is worth a look.
I don’t. I think it deserves to be torn apart from limb to sorry limb, but because it’s so symptomatic of practically everything that’s wrong with our mainstream cinema today, I’ve decided to take it (somewhat) seriously and give it a (somewhat) considered appraisal. The short version, however, is this: As a satire of the film industry, as comedy, even as occasional drama, this is a disaster on just about every level.
For a film industry that congratulates itself on making “musicals,” how have we gotten to a point where song sequences are so excruciating to endure? The only decent contribution from an otherwise pallid Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy score is Kal nau baje, where the hero and heroine implore each other to glance at the moon in unison, and thus have their gaze united, their eyes locked. As romantic proclamations go, it may not be Abhi na jaao chhod kar, but it will do.
What won’t do, however, is the way this song is realised — in some eye-blindingly beautiful beachside, with the heroine posturing as if on a catwalk, with miles of red fabric billowing behind her, and the hero on a raft as if posing for a GQ shoot. Where is the romance any longer? Are we supposed to tune in to the love between hero and heroine, or the one between cinematographer and location? And why do we continue to pursue serious subjects if we do not have the stomach to make appropriately serious movies? We have a golden-goose actress (Amrita Rao) exploited by her family, a filmmaker of integrity (Akshaye Khanna) forced to sell his soul, and a struggler (Arshad Warsi) so desperate that he’ll steal a script from a friend if it’ll make him a star — but how will any of this register if the focus is solely on how to make every scene ha-ha funny? Couldn’t Vora have taken a look at the early Priyadarshan comedies to see how desperation can be mined for dark laughs? As a result, nothing registers — everything comes off like high comedy (of the unintended kind). In the scene where chawl residents decide to chip in and finance Akshaye’s movie, each individual gets up to declare, ‘‘Main bhi producer’’, like how those slaves in ancient Rome rose up in a chain of “I am Spartacus” declarations.
The chawl being a microcosm of the underprivileged, you should have had a lump in your throat during this moment of supreme self-sacrifice. Instead, you roll your eyes and recall the exquisite delicacy with which Luck By Chance took on the film industry. That film is a reminder that not all mainstream cinema is hollow, that there are still artists and visionaries, both old and new — but they take so long between films that most mainstream product bears little relation to their work.
The lowest blow in Short Kut, to me, was when Arshad Warsi, in anticipation of sex, sprinkles rose petals on a bed, puts champagne in a bucket of ice, and launches leeringly into Do sitaron ka zameen par hai milan, from Kohinoor — in a trice, “do sitaron” has been reduced to two cinema stars, and “milan” has been reduced to a romp in the sack. If you can’t help us make new movie memories, can’t you at least keep from desecrating the old ones we’ve hoarded so carefully inside our heads?
Baradwaj Rangan
Film critic, The New Indian Express.
Feedback to this article can be sent to baradwajrangan@epmltd.com
