Talvar "Of Truth, Lies and Red Tape" My Review

Director : Meghna Gulzar

Starring : Irrfan Khan, Konkona Sen, Neeraj Kabi, Soham Shah, Tabu, Atul Kumar, Gajraj Rao 

The Aarushi- Hemraj case, splashed across the media, being fed a pack of lies by the police, then investigating the case, and later the CBI coming in and revealing the criminal botch up that was done by the UP police handling the twin murder of Aarushi and Hemraj. We have all cracked our heads and gone through various emotions as rumors peddled as facts were served to us. Justice has been denied if an innocent has been punished, Justice is also not served when the guilty are let out scot free.

Whatever may be the truth, we would never know, as there is no clear evidence of what really happened on that horrific night in the house of Talwars, known doctors in Noida, rich and respected. Their 14 year old daughter found brutally murdered in her room, and later the prime suspect as per the police, their servant Hemaraj, his body was also discovered, murdered in an identical manner. A mystery that could have been solved if the Police had done due diligence, instead of the mockery they made out of it. Even the CBI could not do much apart from submit a report that they don’t have enough evidence to prove the Talwars guilty. But the special CBI court has sentenced them to life imprisonment and currently they have appealed in the Allahabad high court.

Coming to the film, Talvar just about veils the fact that it is the same case, by changing character names, and organisation names, CBI is CDI in the film. The title itself is similar phonetically to Talwar.

It is not an easy film to watch, as you cannot watch it like just another thriller, whodunit. Everyone who knows about the brutal killings, which is pretty much “everyone”, cannot watch it dispassionately. 

The first 30 minutes of the film are a bit tedious, the writing unsure, but then it gains momentum and by the time you are back after interval, it is compelling, disturbing, all involving and leaves you extremely uncomfortable, questioning your own beliefs, no matter which side you have leaned all this while. The fine writing even manages to infuse humor in the going ons, specially in Gajraj Rao’s scenes,  even when one of the scenes is a bit outlandish… also the dark dark humor that unfolds in the internal CBI meetings… Bravo. The world our house help inhabits, the migrants staying in poor conditions, yet enjoying their off time drinking, watching shows in their mother tongue.. and their eyes straying to the young daughter.. and harbouring lust.. things which we normally don’t see in a film, is shown unflinchingly.. making you squirm in your seats.  The Narco test segments sent a chill down my spine. The film is raw and rough, no frills and no breathers.. and it is this assured treatment that makes it a must watch.

If “Court” had left you frustrated, this will leave you enraged, disturbed, empty and exposed. Scary how easily can the law enforcers, crime solvers, can turn a crime scene into a free for all, contaminate evidence and botch up an investigation of such a heinous crime.

The point the film makes vehemently is it is better to let 10 guilty go than to punish the innocent. Alas one would never really know. Though the film leans towards the Talwars as being innocent, it does allow the other point of view to be presented rather strongly.

A stellar cast of Irrfan, Konkona, Neeraj Kabi, Tabu, Sohum Shah, Atul kumar and Gajraj Rao infuse scary realism to the film. Irrfan as the CDI officer Ashwin Kumar delivers yet another ace performance, playing a video game as he interrogates, humming mera kuchh saaman as his trial separation starts with his wife, played by Tabu,  a small but impactful role. It is such an inspired performance by Irrfan, helped by some great dialogues, as he succeeds in making an officer investigating brutal murders a flesh and blood character, letting us in his ordinary world and ordinary live, going about their business in the most routine way. 

Neeraj and Konkona underplay and win. Full marks to Honey Trehan for picking each actor with precision, and the ensemble works superbly. I would also like to mention A. Sreekar Prasad's absolutely brilliant editing. With a film that involves so many threads and still is just above 2 hours, it is  commendable the way it has been put together. 

Meghna Gulzar finally has a good film under her belt. Some of the scenes are going to stay with me for a long time to come.

My Verdict 3/5

Gulaabo Official Song video Shaandaar

Here it is, Gulaabo!! Really looking forward to Shaandaar. Vikas Bahl's next after the much celebrated Queen. Alia and Shahid make a cute pair.
Amit Trivedi does a good job with this energetic number. Vishal Dadlani and Anusha Mani on the vocals. I Like!!!

The Queen Is Back. My Review. Tanu Weds Manu Returns

Director :  Aanand L. Rai

Starring :  Kangana Ranaut, Madhavan, Jimmy Shergill, Deepak Dobriyal, Swara Bhaskar

This sequel comes 4 years after Tanu Weds Manu. We meet Tanu and Manu  again, but this time it is not all pyaar mohabbat coca cola. They are on the brink of marital collapse, their issues mundane, Tanu is bored, Manu is exhausted. Tanu complains " Ye adrak ho gaya hai, kahin se bhi badh raha hai" Manu says exasperated " Jab shaadi kee thi toh kya Hrithik Roshan tha?"  Love, as is often the case,  in the bland mix of day to day travails of a marriage, gets pushed to some dark corner of the heart and the relationship.

So as Manu is put in the mental asylum ward in London, Tanu flies back home to Kanpur. But not before she calls Pappi, Manu's best friend,  to come and get him out.  Have they fallen out of love or have just forgotten how it feels to love the other?

 The plot thickens deliciously when Manu spots Tanu in a pixie hair cut in a Delhi college. As it turns out it is not Tanu but Kumari Kusum "Datto" Sangwan, a state level hockey player. His heart flutters again, he has found love again, and despite being a 40 year old married man, is ready to follow her around like a puppy chasing a cute motorized toy. Datto is disarmed by his genuineness and charm, his gentlemanly ways and honesty. Thus starts a tender love story. But what will happen when Tanu finds out about Datto and things get into a holy mess?

What I liked was how subtly the film raises some interesting questions about marriage and love and the changes it goes through as people live together, year after year. Did Manu fall in love with Datto or with subconsciously Tanu again, with new facets which he likes? Is Tanu wrong in being bored in a marriage, does an unhappy wife complaining about how mundane the marriage has become give the licence to the husband to fall in love again? If yes then should one even work on a marriage? Should we give up the moment the going gets tough? I may be seeing layers which Aanand never weaved, but I think it is a plus if a film made me think so much!!

Rai has collected quite an ensemble, with some familiar and some new characters. All woven together into this contrived yet endearing tale, with their own individual tracks and troubles! There is Pappi, Jassi, Raja Awasthi, Payal,  Anand Tiwari the Lawyer, Tanu's parents, Manu's parents and Kusum's Bhaiya, Bhabi and family and !! Phew!!

But he manages to weave them together in a tale that is predictable yet you are so involved with the characters, you want to see where fate and love lead them.

What makes TWMR special and stand out in the clutter of loud commercial cinema and superflous rom-coms that Bollywood keeps churning out is Kangana Ranaut.

Kangana Ranaut has yet again proven what a great actor she is, breathing fire into two different characters. A double role which is so well played that you feel for both Kusum and Tanu like they are two friends of yours, and you don't know whose side to take when they get into a fight.  The genius of Kangana makes them so unique... you can only marvel at the hard work that has gone behind this performance. To get a Haryanvi accent correctly, where even stalwarts have often failed, itself is a victory. Her Datto is so real, I felt I was back in my college in Delhi and observing her while eating a samosa from the canteen.

Madhavan is pitch perfect as Manu, and carries off the added layers to his character well. The highlight of the film apart from Kangana is Deepak Dobriyal as Pappi. He has a meaty role and he chews on it with relish. He gets some absolutely fun dialogues and his charged performance lights up every scene he is a part of. Look out for the college lecture scene! And Jimmy Shergill, ooh.. I like I like, Raja Awasthi is back! And he will win more hearts this time around. Mohd Zeeshan Ayub as the young and chalu lawyer is perfectly cast, another good performance from him. Swara is good, as usual. Rajesh Sharma as Datto's brother pulls off another role well and makes the most of it.

Another strength of the film are the dialogues, my favorite being " hum thode bewafaa kya hue, aap toh poore badchalan hogaye" said by Tanu to Manu when she discovers he is in love with Datto. 

And now coming to the music, I loved it!! And in a heart tugging sequence there is Geeta Dutt's Ja Ja Ja Bewaffaa... A fabulous touch!!

The film does get preachy at a few points, but it is well intended. It falters towards the climax, the contrivances and predictability of the plot clouding an otherwise brilliant experience.  But Kangana, the savior comes to the rescue and pulls you back with her sterling performance.

GO WATCH!!!

My rating 3.5/5

All Systems Down My Review Court

Director  Chaitanya Tamhane

Starring  Vira Sathidar, Vivek Gomber, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Pradeep Joshi, Usha Bane, Shirish Pawar

Language  Marathi *English Subtitles 

I am not going to build up to it. Court is a film that hit me in my gut. It was not only because it is a debut film of a director, who is all of 27 years old, that belies his age and life experience, and that it has gathered so many award internationally, but because as the film says through a song.. Don’t insult us by calling us artists… Art is just a way of hiding the truth… a bold statement indeed, when people discuss art vs life and the creative liberties that an artist must have. But does the artist become bigger than the truth? This film is a courtroom drama, but so much more than it and aims and presenting truth and nothing but the truth. And yes, it succeeds in great measures.

A film that is so layered, so full of symbolism, and mind you not of the kind which only the director will understand (wink). The characters are so minutely etched, it is a pleasure to know them.

The story, ah, that being the masterstroke, is of a folk singer/activist who is arrested under the charges of abetting the suicide of a gutter cleaner. Why? Because he performed in the locality where the gutter cleaner lived and two days later committed suicide, found in the same gutters he has spent most of his life cleaning. Even though the charge sounds highly ludicrous, the court takes it seriously. After all justice is serious business.

And thus unfolds the tale.. pitching so many worlds together, against each other… yet with each other, as you see the story progress.

Chaitanya Tamhane, the director uses each scene, almost every shot, to say something. He has managed to comment on a lot of things… and unlike some films, has managed to do it successfully.

The biggest achievement of the film for me was that it made me feel I am fighting the case, I was rooting so much for Narayan Kamble, that I wanted to scream out loud at the way our systems run. Stock witnesses to archaic laws, the apathy of the police, the dozing advocates and the Judge who keeps shifting from black to white to gray.

The detailing in the film is such a pleasure. Not showing off, but just being.. true. From the Public prosecutor who discusses olive oil prices in the local train, cooks  dinner every night, and then finds time to go through her case, her routine life is without a spark, barring an occasional lunch at a Maharashtra thali joint, with her husband and two kids. She is the Mumbai Middle class, which works hard and still doesn’t make enough money. You know she has studied hard to be where she is, and with limited exposure, she relies on the tomes of law, reading her arguments verbatim. “But law is law, no” You want to bang your head when she drones on and on, and yet to see her, I mean really “see” her.

The defence lawyer… belonging to a rich Gujarati family, shops in Natures Basket, loves wine, Jazz and hanging out in swanky lounges. Yes, he is modern and privileged. Yet he fights for the have-nots. His refined self is in steep contrast to the drab courts, yet his largesse is what makes him more human and empathetic to his clients.

Within the scope of the story, Tamhane manages to address issues ranging from the caste divide to the lack of safety equipment for people in hazardous professions, where a cockroach is their saviour, to the UP Maharashtra divide, to the trend of outraging against anything and everything by the various preservers of communities. The steep poverty and the helplessness of the people who do not have resources to fight and can be picked up for anything deemed unlawful by the police, who is clueless to say the least.

The film is not from one cut to another, it breathes organically, as life is… you can leave the room, but the room is still brewing, he stays on scenes even when the characters have left and it works beautifully. The actors are par excellence, each one doing such a great job.

Nothing seems to be changing as centuries go by,  we live in sad times, but there is also hope, there is also the need to raise our voice… and yes, as the climax again underlines… Justice meanwhile takes a leisurely nap.

I cried and clapped various times in the film, laughed at the inanities of our justice system but the feeling that was topmost was that of frustration and finally building to one of “I wish I could be of some consequence in this society we live in, be of help, coz this system is dead Jim”

My Verdict 4/5

Of Truth, Calcutta and the Heady drag My Review Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!

Director  Dibakar Banerjee

Starring   Sushant Singh Rajput, Neeraj Kabi, Anand Tiwari, Swastika Mukherjee, Divya Menon,                       Meiyang Chang

*May contain spoilers

Detective Bomkesh Bakshi, a character that has endured for more than 8 decades… Oh and he hated being called a “detective”. So let’s call him the way he likes it, Satyanweshi, the seeker of truth.

Many adaptations have been made and savoured of  Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s  famous Satyanweshi.  The closest to the mass memory is the one played  famously by Rajit Kapur on Doordarshan. 

Dibakar Banerjee’s Byomkesh Bakshy! (yes, the Ys used twice itself indicate that this is the director’s take on the literary detective ) is set in the early 1940s, a World War II strafed Calcutta, where nothing is what it seems. The turf war between the Chinese drug gangs, the Japanese Army and the British has laid Calcutta wide open.  Danger, deceit and mayhem… this is the world a young Bakshy enters unknowingly.  Approached one day in the college by Ajit Banerjee,  asking for Byomkesh’s help in finding his father Bhuvan Banerjee, a chemical scientist, who has disappeared without a trace two months ago.  A case that seems so simple to Byomkesh that he says in the very first instance that Ajit’s father is dead, his body hidden somewhere! What he doesn’t know that he is going to get embroiled in a mystery so warped, it will be tough to get out alive.

But seek the truth he must, so he finds lodging in a Men’s Only guest house , run by Dr. Anukul Guha, who treats patients for free.  From here the search begins, that leads him through twists and turns, to mysterious yet alluring creatures like the Mata Hariesque Anguri Devi, the strong willed Satyawati and Deputy Commissioner Wilkie, committed to busting the drug scene in Calcutta.

As my current favourite police Detective on TV Blackstrom would say, I am Dibakar, I want to make a larger than life film on the favourite literary detective, what would I do to make it big, make it different, make it real, yet do it in my own unique style, give it the noir hues, create a world that is real in detailing yet magnificently cinematic at the same time.

Well, he manages to do all that and more.  From the first adrenaline pumped scene to the last frame, each scene has been treated like a stand-alone tableau.  The Calcutta that has been painstakingly re-created seems so real that you feel you could step inside and board the tram to Bada Bazaar.  The camerawork is one of the main strengths of the film, by Nikos Andritsakis, who has teamed with Dibakar in LSD and Shanghai.  His camerawork makes simple movements like a pan deliver sheer beauty. He captures perfect frames, at times slow and languorous, at times manic.  Always giving something striking.  As a motif, shadows play a large role in crucial sequences.

The case itself is the first case in the published series,  titled “Satyanweshi”. This was the birth of the detective. But the character of Dibakar’s Bakshy is different from the Bomkesh we all knew in the past. He is young, impulsive, edgy. His razor sharp brain doesn’t miss much, and he while finding the truth also finds time to plant a long kiss on the femme fatale’s scarlet lips.

Now to come to the casting. It was unique and risky to say the least. Will Sushant Singh Rajput even come close to the genius and gravitas of Rajit Kapur was my question. But he doesn’t have to. Dibakar has created Byomkesh which lets Sushant breath in his own skin. The first thing to go was the requirement of a Bengali accent. Dibakar clearly knew it was a risk worth taking.  Sushant has largely succeeded in his effort to play the legendary detective.  Neeraj kabi, again a brilliant actor plays the deceptive  Dr. Anukul with great relish, but in the last few sequences, he ends up messing up… larger than life villain yes, but the hamming came as a shock.  Swastika Mukherjee as Anguri Devi  for me didn’t work initially, but yes.. she grew on me… smoky eyes and pouty lips.  Satyawati played by Divya Menon was believable, fit in perfectly.  Anand Tiwari is brilliant as Ajit Banerjee. Really nuanced performance. Meiyang Chang plays  Kanai  well.

The music of the film is grungy new-age rock. It is used well in most places, and is another spin which propels the director’s vision of the film further.

Dibakar is one of the most gifted directors of our times. He has evolved and broadened his vision, challenged his own limits with every film… DBB is a labour of love and the man knows what he is doing. As he had said in many pre-release interviews,  his Byomkesh will be hated by Puritans, but I do hope they would be able to see beyond the obvious and enjoy the emergence of DBB as possibly a film franchise! 

The  film is not without its flaws. The simple original story has been changed and tweaked, obviously for  the requirement of a full length feature, but it gets laden with just way too many plots and red herrings. The Chinese gang, the Japanese Army, the attack on Calcutta… it becomes a bit of a mish mash at some point.  And then the climax sees a long sequence of  Byomkesh explaining each and everything. The film doesn’t end there… though visually brilliant the last few minutes of the film look like a part of some other movie,  they are so over the top. But as a pay-off it does leave with the promise of a sequel.

But the film has so much going for it, it takes you through such brilliant moments, the detailing that is god level, you let go of the minor flaws and applaud.

My Verdict  3/5