Sirf (2008)

The excellent premise of Sirf - the idea that, as the Zutons say, everyone's got problems, everyone's got stress - is unfortunately quickly ruined by behavior so unrealistic we wondered if these people even CAME FROM THIS PLANET.

But, alas, what little fun we had reinterpreting Sirf as a sci-fi odyssey didn't compensate for the spork-inducing ridiculousness of this movie. This is a damn shame. The set-up is fantastic: welcome to big, bad Mumbai! And meet four couples, each facing their own believable problems and each comprising two vulnerable, imperfect individuals. First, there's the puppy love couple (Ankur Khanna and Nauheed Cyrusi), anxious to get married and set up their perfect home. Next, there's the working class couple (Ranvir Shorey and Sonali Kulkarni) with the seriously ill daughter, trying (and generally failing) to juggle hectic work schedules with quality home time. After them, the newlyweds (Parvin Dabas and Rituparna Sengupta) encountering city-versus-country cultural tensions (she copes about as well as cheese copes with vanilla ice cream). And finally, the wealthy, middle-aged couple (Manisha Koirala and Kay Kay Menon) who flirt with adultery, workaholism and suspicions.


Parvin Dabas, Manisha Koirala and Rituparna Sengupta.


The cute Ankur Khanna.

Basically, the plot's originality and initial appeal (for us) was in the first two couples: the experience of the young couple who just gets excited shopping at Ikea together is rarely seen in film, and it was engaging and cute. The husband-wife dynamic between the working class couple was also well-done and believable. Once we got into the two more cliché couples - the culture clash couple and the middle-aged bored couple - things took a telenovela turn, complete with melodramatic lines such as: "He was out eating paani puri with that witch!" Ay Dios mio! Es todo muy ridicolo.

The similarities between this and other "humanity quilt" films is notable. As with the other films in this genre, we follow a large number of seemingly only tangentially-related couples through their personal turmoils which become more and more entangled. If you'll allow us to be glib, Sirf's role in this long, illustrious line of quilts can be summarized as follows:

• Love, Actually (2003): love is all around!
  
• Salaam-e-ishq (2007): pyaar everywhere hai!
  
• Life... in a Metro (2007): but this is not necessarily a good thing because love hurts...
  
• Sirf (2008): ...and don't bother envying that couple over there, since their relationship is probably crappier than yours.

An interesting idea! Indeed, the four stories are linked by one character admiring the next couple and literally thinking, "God, I wish I was like them..." We then get to follow that envied character to their own very imperfect home life. It seems everyone's pretty far from domestic Elysium!


Is Kay Kay Menon crying because he lost his mobile?


Ranvir Shorey trying - TRYING - to make sense of his climactic scene.

Some minor spoilers...

Yet what ruins this film is the outrageous behaviors and a script which strains credulity. For example, when the film wants to show us the culture shock the naive country wife gets when she attends her new husband's birthday party, it does this by having the husband's birthday cake shaped like a pair of breasts. All the "city people" laugh and jest about this but the PPCC couldn't help but think: Who ARE these people!? Does anyone actually buy boob cakes? Even jokingly? What is he turning, twelve?! Or what about the parents who talk with their doctor about their eight-year-old daughter's chances of surviving a risky surgery... in front of the daughter. (?!!) And that same doctor who, when tragedy strikes, goes, "Well, I told you so!" WTF?!

And then - icing on the boob alien people cake - just listen to this:

• Wife suspects husband of cheating and is generally tired of husband's workaholic nature.
  
• Husband is, when present, attentive, sensitive and upbeat.
  
• One day, during a work meeting, husband is told that wife is pregnant. He flips out with joy! He buys a million toys! When wife comes home, husband has buried himself in a pile of stuffed animals and declares that, paraphrasing, "This half of the room is for me junior, that side of the room is for you junior."
  
• Wife declares she has had an abortion.
  
• A distraught husband expresses concern: "Were there complications?! Are you okay?!"
  
• No, wife says. No complications. She just didn't want to bring a being in the world with such an absent, workaholic father.

What?

What?!!

It's a good thing the PPCC was sitting down for that one, otherwise we would have had a Ranvir Shorey-esque collapse of pure SHOCK.

Which segues nicely into the performances, which were uniformly strong. At least, all these talented actors - Manisha, Kay Kay, Ranvir - were clearly trying very hard with the material they had. Kay Kay Menon's elation and despair in the scene we described above was well-done, as were moments when we saw Manisha's weary hurt at being ignored. We look forward to seeing more from the young 'uns, Ankur Khanna and Nauheed Cyrusi. If we had been more invested in Ranvir's storyline, we probably would have cried in the end, rather than just admiring his technical ability in a cold, hard shell-of-a-PPCC way. The most uneven couple were Parvin Dabas and Rituparna Sengupta. Their story, which began earnestly, slowly devolved into straight dramedy TV serial-style acting: Rituparna Sengupta seemed to morph into someone fresh off the saas-bahu drama set, while Parvin Dabas became the bumbling, put-upon husband. ¿Por qué, filmmaker, por quééééééé? (Side note but Parvin Dabas, who we last saw in Monsoon Wedding, was a revelation: that man was like a cross between Abhishek Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor. Beth, get thee to his movies! ¡Andalé!)

Alas, we can't really recommend this one. The best part about this film was the complementary can of ice-cold Coca Cola that the DVDwallah gave us when we cleared his Ranvir Shorey stock.

Edited a few hours later, after baking a chocolate cake: Forgot something! A pleasant surprise in this film was the occasional use of Western classical which featured, in particular, our two favorites: Philip Glass (!!!) and pieces from Yann Tiersen's soundtrack for Amélie (including possibly J'Y Suis Jamias Alle or Pas Si Simple - anyway, one of the delightful accordion-heavy ones edited like two minutes later: NO! It was definitely Les Jours Tristes... okay, done now, for real). What a weird surprise! We've seen Western classical used in Hindi films before - Parinda and 1942: A Love Story - but never has it been with such TASTE. Yay Philip Glass! Yay Yann Tiersen!

1942: A Love Story (1993)

Well, let's face it. It's a party in the PPCC's heart and only Anil Kapoor is invited.


We wuv u.

Actually, scratch that - Pran, you can come too. And Madhuri, of course. But all you other folk - you Radioheads, you Shashi Kapoors, you pizzas, you family members - can get out. Sorry, there's just no more space for you anymore. Maybe if you grow a mustache and go, "Ah-hyuk, HAH HEYYYY!!!" we'll let you in purely on novelty value (a pizza in a mustache?), but if you're not willing to compromise your individuality in the name of His Stacheliness then it's the road for you! See ya, wouldn't wanna BE YA.

Some of you loyal readers might marvel that, between the known flop Trimurti and the known super-hit 1942: A Love Story, we chose to watch and review Trimurti first. But that's just how we roll. We'd much rather watch something that flopped and find it's a hidden gem for the PPCC than (1) just confirm that, yes, the super-hit classic really is good (booooring), or, even worse, (2) we don't think the super-hit classic is any great shakes (perish the thought!). (Too bad Trimurti really was bad...) And then there's the usual problem: what can we say about 1942: A Love Story that hasn't already been said? And said? And said?

Well, if some of you are coming here from a certain science fiction magazine today, then allow the PPCC to make some wild assumptions about your demographic: white? American? unfamiliar with Bollywood? maybe you just watched a certain little film win Best Picture at the Golden Globes last night? Then stick around, because this may be the only way the PPCC can contribute anything of value in our review of 1942. We can say, behold!, Bollywood virgin, that sleazy game show host from Slumdog Millionaire is a lot more famous in India for this (aaand this) than some flashy yet likable quasi-Orientalist super-hyped glittering bauble that wins like ten gazillion unexpected awards. Ta da!


One of the film's many iconic moments.


"I saw a girl and it was like... like... " JUST SAY IT, FOR GOD'S SAKE. IT WAS LIKE FLOWERS BLOSSOMING. LIKE A POET'S VERSE. Oooooh, ek ladki ko dekha to aisa lagaaaaaa...

A rare historical romance, 1942's lovers are the bouncy, bourgeois Naren (Anil Kapoor) and the kind-hearted Rajeshwari (Manisha Koirala). He is a pampered, upbeat muppet whose father (Manohar Singh) is an evil collaborator with the British Raj, while she is a quiet working class girl whose father (Anupam Kher) is an underground revolutionary. The lovers meet via a couple coincidences and Naren's local amateur theater director, played by - wait for it, wait for it - we can't say it, it's too wonderful - okay, yes, yes, we can say it - PRAAAAAAN (!!!!!). The year is, yes, 1942 and hence we are thick in the heat of the Indian Independence Movement. For once, some effort has gone not only into authentically recreating the historical context - pageboy hats, old cars, and saddle shoes abound - but also in presenting a believable portrait of oppression under the British Raj. The film's villain, the British General Douglas (Brian Glover, looking distinctly like he could be Colin Mochrie's dad), speaks in a caricatured raspy growl, but everything else is presented realistically and sans outrageous embellishment. Throw in one hunky freedom fighter, Shubhankar (Jackie Shroff), and one hunky tormented collaborator, Major Hisht (Danny Denzongpa), and the fun abounds. Throw in a secret plot to assassinate General Douglas, and the tension skyrockets!

This film is really an enjoyable little number. Director Vidhu Vinod Chopra has an excellent eye for iconic framing, and the narrative has a sort of epic drive that makes even the most throwaway scene feel cataclysmic and gargantuan. Some moments - such as when Naren pursues Rajeshwari through the town's alleys, or Pran's arrest - aspired to sublimity. The film also made innovative use of Romeo and Juliet - indeed, this is the first time we've seen Shakespeare's lovers used in a Hindi film rather than the more typical Laila and Majnu myth. In 1942, the local theater company is performing a Hindi translation of Romeo and Juliet, and Naren and Rajeshwari naturally fall into these roles. We at the PPCC have been culturally indoctrinated into Romeo and Juliet, and so when this film passed all the same defining moments - the balcony scene, the secret marriage, the misinformation about their lover's death - it got an immediate emotional response from us. Even better, like West Side Story to racism, this film managed to successfully graft the classical Romeo/Juliet mythos over the much larger narrative about the freedom struggle.


The balcony scene squeezed squishy feelings from our heart, and we relived the thousand other balcony scenes we've all seen and loved.


PraaaAAAAAAAAaaaaAAAAAAAAAaan! Admit it, this is not the craziest thing we've caught Pran doing.

Another interesting thing to note were the visual and aural allusions to the freedom struggle. Director Chopra often uses classical Western pieces in his background score, and here he makes heavy use of a certain recognizable Western piece to herald the British Raj's oppressive military presence. Which one is it? Why, it's Holst's Mars, God of War. Clever! Meanwhile, the scenes of Indian resistance are accompanied by the rousing anthem, Saare Jahan Se Accha, or a really phat, speedy sitar riff.


A cunning visual reference to the anti-imperial struggle: Princess Leia buns!

The performances were all fine. We should admit that another reason we were not so excited to see this was that we're not very interested in soft focus romances - and we certainly don't watch Anil Kapoor for his straightforward, vanilla hero roles. Nonetheless, he's effectively Mickey Mouse in this. Manisha Koirala does her usual ethereal moping thing. But the real stand-out of this film was Anupam Kher. See! Anupam Kher is a good actor - a very good actor! Just give the man something to work with! In 1942, he is worlds apart from the usual grating comedy antics he was forced to do: here, his performance is extremely understated, quietly passionate, fragile and compelling. We found his scenes more moving than the lovers!


Oh, Anupam Kher!


Pran and Anil Kapoor sharing celluloid is almost too much for the PPCC to handle.

Much is made of this being legendary music director R.D. Burman's final film. The oft-parodied Ek Ladki Ko Dekha (I saw a girl) is lovely (if overly familiar), but - and please don't burn the PPCC down for this - we actually didn't really dig the rest of the soundtrack. Plus, it was one of those relentless soundtracks with song after song after song - for once, we wanted to skip the songs and get back to the most excellent story!


Guh, just look at that composition! "Jai Hind!" indeed!

Lajja (2001)

Some movies end with "Thank You!" instead of "The End", and the epic, dismal, nominally "feminist" misfire that is Lajja (Shame) should give us some gratitude too, wethinks. Gratitude for sitting through three hours and twenty minutes of a relentless, ham-fisted grotesquerie about the Plight of Women, where the scenes swing from fantasy-style empowerment to incredibly distressing violence. We'll just say up front that we found the recent Chak De! India and the zany, emancipated Beta much more succesful feminist Hindi films. Lajja, for however hard it tries, ultimately left us with a bad taste in our mouth - it wasn't challenging, subversive or uplifting. It was just angry and angering. In short, Lajja was to misogyny what Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal was to racism: both films tackle an unsavory, real life topic in a clumsy and ultimately ineffectual way.

The first red flag, for us, was director Rajkumar Santoshi's well-meaning but subtly offensive disclaimer:


Last line, in particular: "After all, the greatness of a civilization can only be measured by the status of its women."

Ahem. Okay. Right. This annoys us because why can't society also be measured by the status of its men? Why are women relegated to this "special" role, serving as representative tokens? In particular, the film itself criticizes Indian culture's "hypocrisy" in putting women on a pedestal - for example, Sita of the Ramayana, or the eternal "Maa" of filmidom - worshipping them while simultaneously imprisoning them in highly restrictive ideals of purity, chastity, morality, and so forth. Yet the film seems to suffer from this very thing, if we're measuring freaking civilizations by the size of that pedestal! Also, very importantly, notice that the harrassed heroine, Vaidehi (Manisha Koirala), is a stereotypical filmi Good Indian Wife: that is, she is distressed not only by her husband's physical abuse and philandering - as anyone would be - but she is also alarmed by seeing her emancipated friend, Janki (Madhuri Dixit), drinking, smoking and whistling. And the Good Indian Wife gets the happy ending, whereas Janki is the victim of mob violence! We got the distinct feeling that, as much as director Santoshi wanted to emancipate and empower women, he still suffered from that particularly male-centric desire to define the terms in which women can be emancipated. Apparently it's okay to want to be free from domestic abuse, but it's not really okay to try things, have vices, make mistakes or, gosh, not want children (shudder at the thought!) as every woman in this film is associated with being a (potential) mom.

The odyssean tale begins with Vaidehi (a gloomy Manisha Koirala), imprisoned in the first ring of misogynistic inferno: her husband, the schmoozy, boozy Raghu (Jackie Shroff), gives her a lot of material wealth and a lot of problems. He openly flirts with other women and hits Vaidehi behind closed doors. When Vaidehi finds the strength to escape, she flees to her parents' home in India - and her parents, in what will become a running leitmotif of the film, offer practically no sympathy and urge her to return to Raghu. Meanwhile, Raghu has been in a car accident and found that he's sterile and Vaidehi is pregnant. His desire to track Vaidehi down therefore becomes much more intense, as she becomes - clang! another blunt note! - importantly and merely a "baby-producing machine" that he can dispose of once the baby is born. He sends his two goons (a highly restrained Johnny Lever and Razak Khan, thank goodness) to track her down.

Vaidehi now runs around the subcontinent fleeing from her evil husband's evil goons' evil clutches. And along the way, she runs into every Representative Problem of Indian Women that director Santoshi could think of. First: dowry. Vaidehi gate crashes a wedding in order to hide from the cops. There, she runs into the first (of two) good guys, the thief with a heart of gold, Raju (a very cute Anil Kapoor), as well as a gaggle of unexpected 1970s masala comedians (Asrani! Jagdeep! a Johnny Walker lookalike!). Vaidehi and Raju and the comedians witness the evil conniving of the groom's family as it tries to extort as much dowry money as possible from the harried father of the bride (Anjan Shrivastav).


A special note about Asrani: he looks AMAZING for his age! A special note about Jagdeep: we secretly hard-core love Jagdeep and think he was an untapped potential of humanistic, tragicomic genius. We have also decided that he will be playing Anil Kapoor's father in the film we're writing.

Next up: the working woman. Hindi films have a long tradition of showing the theatre woman's doomed attempts at love and marriage due to society likening her to little more than a prostitute. Vaidehi indeed runs into the feisty, fun Janki (Madhuri Dixit), who is pregnant, unmarried, a drinker, a smoker, a whistler and the star of a local theatre company. When the jealous and evil theatre owner (Tinnu Anand) plants the seeds of doubt in Janki's lover's mind, lead actor Manish (Sameer Sodi), Janki is quickly dumped and asked to have an abortion. In retaliation, Janki becomes a little wasted and - in the film's most blunt but also most satisfying mini-climax - rewrites the Ramayana play they're performing to demand why Sita must be tested by fire, why not Ram too?! Good one. As Carla noted, this nugget is representative of the entire film: that is, it is a criticism of Sita's famous trial by fire, on which so much of Indian culture's gender relations are based. (Nota bene that all the heroine's names are variations of Sita's.)


You made Sita cry! BESHARAM!

Anyway, third problem: infanticide (and a little wollop of casteism). Vaidehi's next stop is in a tiny village ruled by an evil thakur type, Gajendra (Danny Denzongpa). The village's midwife, Ramdulaari (Rekha), is progressive and empowered - uh oh, this doesn't bode well in a film where all except two of the male characters are violent, stupid and evil. As Ramdulaari welcomes her computer geek son back from university, she is horrified to learn that he has fallen in love with Gajendra's daughter. This gives Gajendra the perfect pretext to get rid of Ramdulaari once and for all. Yet with the arrival of the second (of two) good guys, the dacoit with a heart of gold, Bulwa (a very studly Ajay Devgan), a full-scale dishoom dishoom is unleashed. The remaining half hour of the film sounds like this: dishoom! whack! aarghhh! wahh-pshhhh! splash! gurgle! thump!

And the PPCC of course: siiiigh.

Just when we were thinking, "Hey, it's been over an hour and no sign of Anil or Madhuri. Did Santoshi just forget about them!?" Santoshi proves that, no, he didn't - as he ties everything up, a little haphazardly, in a hasty "happy" ending.


Man, we wish we could just chill out with Rekha sometimes.

We've already described the film's main problem above. Basically, it's a dangerously oversimplified, one-sided view of a complex and deep-rooted problem. In this film, all women are pure, virginal and true, and all - except two - of the men are either stupid, evil or both. While Santoshi's disclaimer notes that things have been "amplified for deaf people to take note", we think he undermines his own message by being so "loud". Awful things happen to women in this film, and it seems like anything less than perfection - both in terms of personal strength and purity - is severely punished. Often, even perfection itself isn't enough, and then it's up to Anil Kapoor and Ajay Devgan to sweep in and save the damsels in distress.


Manisha and Madhuri. One of the few moments when they're not CRYING ABOUT BEING A WOMAN in this evil man's world.

Which segues nicely into a note about the two sole "good guys". We thought it was interesting that both good guys are "anti-socials", a thief and a dacoit, operating outside of the system. Way to the stick it to the Man! Anil's Raju openly criticizes the establishment as a hateful society, noting that going to jail would be a respite from its wretchedness (ha! we liked that line, btw), while Ajay's Bulwa seems to embody a fiercely independent (notable in itself) and proto-feminist Jai Santoshi Maa! mentality. One of the most notable scenes (slight spoiler), we think, is when Bulwa has the chance to behead Raghu the evil husband. As he raises his machete, Vaidehi screams in horror. Bulwa stops himself and, angry, bellows at Vaidehi that "you women are your own worst enemies!" and only an "Indian woman" would still be apalled by the decapitation of her clearly evil husband. We think this scene is interestingly saying that Indian women's culturally-approved devotion to the sanctity of marriage (sometimes embodied in their inability to remove their mangalsutra or, you know, watch their husband get decapitated without flinching) is against their own interest. A fascinating, weird scene.


Shameless Ajay Devgan pic, but, goodness, he looked divine in this film. STUD! And Good Guy #1.


That said, our heart belongs to Anil Kapoor these days. Awwww! Good Guy #2. Dilsquish!!

We wanted to like this film, because anything pro-woman gets big brownie points at the PPCC. Unfortunately, we found this like a much more bloated Mirch Masala - a facile, unhelpful look at "how women suffer". We highly recommend, however, that you watch it yourself as it can certainly stimulate useful debate.