No Smoking (2007)

In the literal "middle" of "Nowhere".


Just one of several disturbing images.

Arghhhh, our brain! OUR BRAAAAAIN! While Paresh Rawal's evil Guruji was busy severing souls from bodies, the PPCC's brain was slowly coming unhinged. We tried to keep track of everything in this film but eventually resorted to just listing references we recognized, because we couldn't make any sense of it. Filmi Girl's review has much more sense than this one, so we definitely recommend you read hers for intelligent commentary on this film. If you'd like instead our baffled "???!" take, then read on.

No Smoking, Anurag Kashyap's supremely surreal film, tells the story of "K" (John Abraham), a chain smoker who, after being threatened with divorce by his wife (Ayesha Takia) and encouraged by his friend (Ranvir Shorey), joins a radical rehabilitation program called the Laboratory. The Lab's director is Guruji (Paresh Rawal), and he is attended to by a wide variety of dwarves, giants, women in burqas and ghostly, whispering apparitions. "K"'s rehabilitation is a sinister, soul-sucking, Stephen King-inspired experience which includes finger-chopping, abduction, random explosions and, in the coup de grace, literally imprisoning the soul.

Well.

When the PPCC wasn't laughing at the occasional moments of dark humor, we were crying from TERROR. Yes, PPCC reader log, yes. We are a wet blanket when it comes to surreal art, and feeling disoriented scares us. We spent so much time clinging onto the few, rare moments of logic and whimpering "Mommy!" that we had just no idea what the hell this movie was really talking about. It certainly wasn't talking about smoking. Or was it? Filmi Girl reckons it was about homosexuality, or other subversive behaviors. Or was it about the Holocaust? Or the death of the individual in society? OW, MY BRAIN!


Reminiscent of the club scene in Trainspotting.


Reminiscent of The Matrix.

This was scarier than that surreal art installation movie thing we saw at the Tate Modern that one time - but that was just five minutes, and we were surrounded by people, and it was just about some women who keeps walking up stairs that never end. But this! THIS! This was two freakin' hours of Dalí and dimensions changing frame to frame and scenes restarting in different ways and, occasionally, just icing on the crazy cake, old Hitler speeches disguising themselves as doorbells or mobile ringtones. *sob* Then there were moments of American Psycho and American Beauty. And, of course, K for Kafka! Arghhh, what does it all meeeean?!

We have no idea. We've always been absolute crap at surrealism since we're just so baffled by it. Indeed, No Smoking will perforce have limited appeal, as its aesthetic is so alienating and its point - whatever it is! - is buried so deep in confounding, sometimes contradictory allusions and references. As a friend of the PPCC once remarked about a favorite scarf of ours: It raises more questions than it answers! Are smokers Fascists, or the people who ban smoking? Is K's soul tied to his family, his passions or himself? Why is Ranvir Shorey in a perm and cross-eyed?


Paresh Rawal was fabulously bizarre.


Was this movie really about THEM?! We have no idea.

We have to really hand it to Anurag Kashyap, for his extraordinarily unique vision, and to John Abraham, for being in this film. Poor John gets written off by us and our friends for being a pretty pin-up boy, and yet, if we really pay attention to him, it's clear that he's invested quite a lot of thought into his roles and he's desperate to push the envelope. This film, which is about as weird as can get, is a great thing to have made. We can't really say we enjoyed it, but we definitely appreciated it.

Now we just need to go bury ourselves in a comfortingly familiar, undemanding 1970s masala movie to cleanse ourselves of the weird! (And, yes, we HAVE to see Dev.D now.)

Salaam-e-Ishq (2007)

Who's this guy? We don't know. But we love his expression. And, gosh, we're gonna swim against the tide and say, Anil, you should shave your stache sometimes just to mix it up a bit!

"Timepass" is a word that gets tossed around a lot when reviewing Hindi films. We at the PPCC have never actually used it, as we've never been sure what it's supposed to mean. Is it good that time passed? Or is it time that we want back? And surely, PPCC that we are, we watch movies for more than just to... pass the freakin' time. I mean, that happens already!

But Salaam-E-Ishq (A salute to love) is pretty much that: a timepass. It was a neutral companion to an otherwise sociable night, and we spent most of the evening cheerfully indifferent to what was happening onscreen. Every so often, we would turn our attention back to see yet another couple weeping from this seemingly infinite source of romantic melodrama, and we were left none the wiser about what was going on and not really very interested about what happened to who.

In fact, we at the PPCC don't think that we would have even understood most of the plotlines if we hadn't read the Wikipedia entry before watching. They hardly made an impression. And the only plotlines we did pay any amount of attention to - the memory loss one, the adultery one, the white girl one - ended up seeming facile and superficial. Scene one: man is bored. Scene two: man meets mistress. Scene three: affair. Scene four: man asks for forgiveness. What? That's it?

Very briefly, the plot: There's Memory Loss Couple (John Abraham and Vidya Balan), Adultery Couple (Anil Kapoor and Juhi Chawla), Starlet Couple (Priyanka Chopra and Salman Khan and a little bit o' Tinnu Anand!), Taxi-Wallah Meets White Girl Couple (Govinda and Shannon Esra), Comedy Subplot Suhaag Raat Couple (Sohail Khan and Isha Koppikar) and Commitment Phobic Couple (Akshay Khanna and Ayesha Takia and a little bit o' Prem Chopra!).


Oh, you poor, sweet John Abraham. You go back to your Dostana and have some fun.

Normally we're big fans of these broad canvas emotional epics, and we love ensembles too. In fact, give us an ensemble of roughly sketched stereotypes any day over some meticulously detailed single protagonist. Better Serenity to, say, Pasqualino Settebellezze. Two hours is, after all, a long time to spend in just one person's head (and, in this case, it was almost four hours!). Plus, we like the Baroque Love, Actually "oh, humanity!" web of life vibe, where significant characters brush shoulders on the street and never realize that they're both living their own private melodramas. That's so true, philosophically-speaking, isn't it? We're all the heroes of our private films.

Yet - and we hate to say this - all the other reviews are correct. Salaam-e-Ishq (whose title is taken, incidentally, from one of our favorite Rekha songs) suffers from too much weight. There's just two many plotlines, too many emotions, and too much happening for a simple PPCC to comprehend. It was impossible to emotionally engage on anything but the most superficial level. Despite talented actors, such as Anil and Juhi, putting in their best efforts - Anil even gets a meltdown! YESSS! - they were the merest fleeting glimpses of people. Partly this was the director's fault, too, as only a supremely efficient storyteller could paint a compelling and deep mini-story with literally four or five scenes. That's not to say the director, Nikhil Advani, doesn't do very well in some moments. The monotony of Anil's London life is established quickly and elegantly with some good aesthetic: repetition, muted colors, faceless hordes. Unfortunately, where Advani's storytelling was tight and astute in some moments, it became bloated and dragged in others - as funny as Akshay Khanna's commitment-fearing bachelor was, the jokes quickly went stale with over-use.

Advani gave himself a fairly impossible task - tell six compelling mini-films in under four hours - and succeeded in lumps. This is a shame, since we enjoyed all the performances - from Priyanka's hilarious third-person Kamini, to Akshay's wailing insecurities, to Juhi's restraint, to Anil's meltdowns (sans stache!), to John Abraham's earnest earnestness, to the unexpected and welcome surprises of PPCC house favorites Prem Chopra and Tinnu Anand!


Salman Khan even got the better of us and, when we were paying attention, we had to admit he was kinda cute. Aw, shyucks!

The songs were also quite fab. Beth already warned us that the title song was great - and it was! It was a glorious anthem to the big canvas idea we were talking about. Just watch it and you'll see. But also try to follow what's happening to all the characters, especially as the tempo picks up towards the end - aargh, it's too much, too fast! This "everyone all the time!" show continues into the melancholy Ya Rabba which similarly attempts to capture everything that's happening to everyone and succeeds only partially. We paid attention to what was happening to our favored story threads - those being Memory Loss, Adultery and White Girl - but the rest of the plots just became clutter. And that pretty much goes for the entire film: pretty shots, compelling stories, nice performances, but just too much clutter! It becomes a big old jumble that (inevitably, as we haven't emotionally invested in anyone really) loses steam and becomes an overlong stretch of soap.