The Gorilla’s Lament

No review this week. It’s my birthday, and I’m spending the day relaxing with family. While wearing this shirt:

Well, outtake, really. This screen shot has nothing to do with my review, but check out the policeman on the left getting felt up by one of the crooks.

At first Dream Girl (1977) seems like standard Bollywood fare, a typical story of love, deception, gangsters, orphans, family, mistaken identities, giant wedding cakes, and the world’s worst prostitute. And then, halfway through the film, something happens. Something . . . unusual.

As the film opens, millionaire playboy Anup (Dharmendra) is living the life of a millionaire playboy. It is his birthday, and his party is attended by a score of attractive young women all eagerly throwing themselves at his feet. Anup enjoys the attention, but he’s saving himself for his “dream girl”; not long ago, he bought a portrait of an unknown but beautiful woman from a roadside vendor, and was instantly infatuated.

The very next day, Anup bumps into his dream girl, Sapna (Hema Malini), in the flesh. She’s smart, sassy, and sophisticated, claims to be a princess, and after some initial flirting, she breaks into his car and steals his money before vanishing. Coincidentally, the theft delays Anup long enough to delay a shady and potentially disastrous business deal set up by his weaselly cousin Prem (Prem Chopra). Good news for Anup, very bad news for Prem.

Sapna has a secret. (She has many secrets, but let’s deal with one at a time, shall we?) She is a con artist and petty thief, but she only steals to support “Happy Home,” the orphanage she runs with her equally felonious but goodhearted brother Chandru (Asrani). Sapna and Chandru would love to give up their criminal ways and get real jobs, but if they did they couldn’t make enough money to support their orphans, and there’s no way they could afford a trip to America and expensive medical treatment for Chintu (Master Chintu), the crippled but artistically gifted Adorable Orphan In Chief.

While raising money for Chintu’s operation, Sapna (in various wacky disguises) keeps crossing paths with Anup. Eventually one of her scams backfires, and she and Chandru are caught red handed by a significantly less infatuated Anup, and he agrees to let them go if Sapna will pretend to be his fiance and help convince his overprotective grandfather (Ashok Kumar) not to arrange a marriage for him. (This is a terrible plan, because there’s no endgame. No fake fiance can last forever, but Anup hasn’t thought about what happens next.)

Anup’s grandfather thrilled by the “princess”, and when he learns that her alleged parents are allegedly out of town, he insists that she move in right away. Before long, he gives her the keys to the safe; she’s very tempted to take the money and run (in order to pay for Chintu’s operation, and perhaps a trip to Disneyland) but the old man has grown to depend on her, so she stays.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Chandru has just been arrested for theft. (He’s innocent, surprisingly.) No one is left to care for the orphans, so Chintu is forced to lead his adorable comrades into the streets to search for Sapna. They find her, but since Sapna is hoping to gather enough money from Anup and his family to pay for Chintu’s operation, so she refuses to break cover and pretends she doesn’t know them.

Anup, of course, follows the orphans, and learns the truth. He uses his pull to have Chandru released from jail, and then makes for arrangements for Chintu’s treatment. He also takes a second look at Sapna, and after a long conversation the two are engaged for real.

Prem, meanwhile, catches sight of Sapna, and recognizes her from her younger days as a prostitute named Champabai. He tries to blackmail her, but she outfoxes him. He reveals the truth to Anup’s family, but she has already vanished, leaving behind a letter explaining the truth. Confronted with this evidence, Anup decides that it doesn’t matter - he knows that Sapna is a good person, and her past is less important than her actions and the person she’s chosen to become. Nobody else seems to agree, and his housekeeper and former nanny is so shocked by his defense of a fallen woman that she reveals a long kept secret of her own. Anup leaves the house to find Sapna.

And then . . . well, what do you expect? There’s some more melodrama, and a spectacularly silly fight scene, and the family patriarch learns a valuable lesson. Nothing that unusual.

What is unusual about Dream Girl is the relationship between Sapna and Anup. His early infatuation her portrait is portrayed as just an infatuation, and it’s clear that he falls in love with her not because she’s beautiful, not because she’s a traditional Inidan girl he can bring home to Mother, but because she’s a good person. (And vice versa, really; Anup is handsome and rich, but helping the orphans is what impresses Sapna.) It’s not the sort of relationship you see every day at the movies.

When reviewing a movie, I generally try to avoid spoilers, but the big twist in Red Rose is telegraphed from the very beginning: Anand (Rajesh Khana), wealthy businessman, suave hairy-chested bachelor, and our apparent protagonist, is a serial killer. Whenever he meets an attractive woman, he’s haunted by visions of a village girl in a slight state of undress. The women in question tend to mysteriously vanish soon after.

Anand’s latest obsession is Sharda (Poonam Dhillon). Unlike the other women Anad meets, Sharda is a Nice Indian Girl, and won’t let herself be lured back to his isolated mansion before marriage, so he has to woo her. He does so mostly by being creepy; he goes to the department store where she works, stares at her for a while, then buys a single handkerchief from her every day. After buying a t-shirt from another counter in order to make her jealous, Anand follows Sharda on her way home, confesses his love, and suddenly they’re a couple. Love is a funny thing.

Anand brings his bride home to the mansion, shows her every room in the building except one, introduces her to his strange, sullen servants, drops a few more hints about his psychological instability, sings a love song which lasts for an indeterminate amount of time, and then has to leave the house for a sudden business emergency. (And by business emergency, I mean tracking down and killing the waiter who saw him with an earlier victim.) Left alone, Sharda literally stumbles onto the horrible truth: her new husband is a murderer, and everyone else in the house is in on it. Including the cat.

It all sounds very exciting, and it should; the story has persisted for centuries, in one form or another. Unfortunately, Red Rose is shot and edited like . . . like a foreign art film from the seventies, full of strange camera angles and acid trip flashbacks and long, ponderous conversations that sound like they’re supposed to be profound but never actually go anywhere, all set to a funky, jazz tinged (and really excellent) soundtrack. This movie is slow.

The film also spends more screentime on Anad and Sharda’s stalkertastic courtship than on the presumably interesting parts. Rajesh Khanna’s performance may be a little too good. He plays Anand as a man with a deeply warped sexuality who has been training since his teenage years to avenge himself and his adopted father against all the treacherous women of the world. He’s a volitile mix of sleazy charm and neurotic tics, and it’s hard to see what Sharda, a perfectly nice girl, sees in him.

There may be a deeper message here, especially in light of the early scene of Anand at the prison distributing sweets and fruits to convicts, all of whom were guilty of various acts of violence against women. However, any such message is undercut by all the shower scenes. This is a movie which can’t decide what it wants to be; it’s too ponderous to be thrilling and too exploitative to be profound.

Bollywood isn’t the only film industry in India; every corner of the country has its own regional cinema, each with its own quirks. For example, many Gujarati films, such as Aa Che Aadamkhor (2005), are actually plays. I don’t mean plays adapted to film, I mean that they are performed on a stage, and that performance is then filmed. It’s a very different dynamic than your average Bollywood movie, more suited to intimate character studies than technicolor song and dance spectacles. (Gujarati films also tend to be too obscure for the IMDB, so while the back of the DVD case lists the cast, I have no idea who plays what.)

Aa Che Aadamkhor opens with the unfortunate Rahul being savagely beaten by a police inspector. Despite the inspector’s persistence, Rahul adamantly denies having killed anyone; sure, he tampered with evidence, impersonated a police officer, and tried to blackmail an innocent woman, but he didn’t kill anybody. He also insists that Vibhut isn’t guilty of the murder either. The inspector, half convinced, takes a brief break from the police brutality to muse about whom the real killer might be.

The scene shifts to a small bungalow, a few days before the beating, and we meet Vibhut. Eight months ago, Vibhut was in a terrible car accident; he’s spent much of those eight months in the hospital, and is still suffering from a number of vaguely defined mental effects, including amnesia, though he recognizes all the people around him and it’s never clear what he’s forgotten, if anything. Vibhut’s wife Kruti is incredibly supportive, determined to do whatever she can to help him get better, but equally determined to stand by him whether he gets better or not. Their doctor and friend, Bhavesh, has loved Kruti for years, but it’s a noble self sacrificing love, so he wants to help Vibhut because it will make Kruti happy.

Surendra Dalal, a solicitor, aspiring politician, and Kruti’s father, is not so supportive. He never liked Vibhut, and after the accident he considerts his son-in-law a failed project and an unnecessary drain on his finances; he wants Kruti to divorce Vibhut, marry Bhavesh, and get to work producing male grandchildren right away.

Surendra isn’t shy about making his feelings known. Soon, Vibhut has had enough and runs away from home. (Well, drives away, really.) Kruti is frantic, and Surendra is actually helpful and supportive for once; he may not like his son-in-law, but he does like his daughter.

After a few harrowing days, the police find Vibhut’s car, and soon after find Vibhut himself. He’s mostly fine, though he does have a rare case of double amnesia. He’s gone from an undefined amnesia to a very specific amnesia, having lost all memory of the last few days. This is unfortunate, because the horribly mutilated body of a young woman was found next to his car, making Vibhut the prime suspect.

The stage format has its strengths, but it also has its weaknesses; you have limited locations, a limited cast, and severely limited special effects. That’s why Greek tragedies tend to revolve around a messenger reporting that something horrible has just happened offstage. Greek tragedians can get away with this because the audience already knows the story they’re watching. When the story is original and, at least in part, a mystery, the audience needs more information.

That is the problem with Aa Che Aadamkhor. Nearly every significant development in the plot takes place offstage. At times, we don’t even get to see the messenger, we just learn that the characters have learned something significant in between scenes. And in the end, the inspector announces that he’s solved the murder offstage, using clues that he gathered offstage, he arrests then murderer, and that is that. It’s like watching an episode of CSI focused on the victim’s boyfriend, who’s cleared in the first fifteen minutes; you have some suspense, and inexplicable things happen, and then the mystery is solved by someone else, using information you do not have.

Sunday (2008) is about Sehar Thapar (Ayesha Takia), a bright, pretty young professional living in Delhi who wakes up one morning to find that she’s lost a day. She turns to ACP Rajveer Randhava (Ajay Devgan), a brutal, deeply flawed, but very effective police officer, for help. As Rajveer gets closer to unraveling the mystery of the missing day, he learns that someone was killed that night, and it looks very much like Sehar is the killer.

It’s a perfect premise for a tense psychological thriller exploring Delhi’s seamy underbelly, a Filmi Noir in the tradition of 88 Antop Hill. Sunday, however, is a comedy. Not a dark comedy or a noir satire, mind you, just an action comedy with an unusually dark premise and a supporting cast of wacky characters, most notably Ballu (Arshad Warsi), a hot-tempered unlicensed taxi driver with a secret, and his cool, composed, and slightly delusional sidekick Kumar (Irfan Khan), an aspiring actor.

Even the two leads are not what you’d expect. Sehar isn’t a plucky young doctor or lawyer, she’s a plucky young voiceover actress who makes a living dubbing foreign films and cartoons, and uses her array of silly voices to get herself out of (and into) trouble.

Rajveer, on the other hand, is a dirty cop, almost cheerfully corrupt. He loves taking bribes almost as much as he loves ice cream, and he really, really loves ice cream. Since he’s the hero, he’s really a good man just waiting for a gentle nag from the right woman to give up his criminal ways, and since he’s played by Ajay Devgan, he’s very good at punching people.

Bollywood is known for wild shifts in tone, and Sunday is no exception. The murders are played completely straight, while everything else is a potential source of laughs, up to and including a drug addled Sehar being picked up off the streets of Delhi by a succession of strange men. The effect is a bit disorienting, and the quick cuts and flashy editing tricks don’t really help.

While the tone is incoherent, the plotting is generally solid. The true identity of the killer seems to come out of left field, but on a second viewing everything fits, apart from one glaring plot hole. There are some solid performances, particularly from Arshad Warsi and Irrfan Khan. Apart from that, it’s a typical action comedy with a very atypical premise.

Despite the title, Speed (2007) has nothing to do with bombs, buses, or Sandra Bullock. Instead, it takes the basic premise from a different Hollywood film, Cellular, adds an overly complicated assassination plot, and then tosses in action sequences lifted from such movies as Kill Bill and Romeo Must Die.

Zayed Khan plays Sandeep ‘Sandy’ Arora, a spoiled rich kid who flies to London hoping to convince his estranged girlfriend Sanjana (Tanushree Dutta) to marry him. Even a musical number fails to win her over, so Sandy goes to fetch his suitcase, which contains the perfect gift to convince Sanjana that he’s changed and is now mature and ready for marriage - a teddy bear!

Meanwhile, soccer mom and science teacher Richa Verma (Urmila Matondkar) has been kidnapped by terrorists Kabir Khan (Aftab Shivdasani, clean shaven and sporting a terrible haircut) and Monica (Sophiya Chaudhary). Richa manages to MacGyver the broken phone in the burned out barn where she’s being held, and tries to call her husband.

Instead, she gets through to Sandy, just as he’s about to put his terrible, terrible teddy bear plan into action. Sandy is suspicious, but after overhearing the kidnappers being eeeevil he’s quickly convinced. He tries to tell the police, but gets thrown out of the station, so instead Sandy is left running around London trying his best to help her, all while keeping the line open. And he screws up.

Richa’s husband Siddharth (Sanjay Suri) is also having a bad day. he is not, as Richa thinks, a chef; he’s an agent of MI-5, hard at work trying to decrypt a mysterious transmission when he’s interrupted by a phone call from the people who have kidnapped his wife. He’s sent on a series of mysterious errands, but it’s clear that the kidnappers are planing something big, something involving the visiting Prime Minister of India (Suhasini Mulay).

After reading some other online reviews, it’s clear that I am the only person in the world who liked Speed, but I liked Speed. While the plot is baroque in the way that only a Bollywood thriller can be, the pace is such that it never has a chance to drag.

It helps that the movie has a fantastic cast. Sanjay Suri’s Siddharth is no James Bond, he’s a decent family man caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And Zayed Khan’s Sandy undergoes some actual character development. At the beginning of the movie, Sanjana is completely correct; Sandy is an immature screw-up. It’s only when he takes the initiative and stops looking to other people to tell him what to do that he’s able to become an effective hero. It’s not Hamlet, but it worked for me.

Man Pasand (1980) is dedicated to George Bernard Shaw, and the filmmakers would very much like you to think that it’s adapted directly from Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Don’t you believe it for a second. Man Pasand lifts blatantly, shamelessly, gleefully from My Fair Lady; any doubts are dispelled when the lovely but unpolished railway toothbrush vendor Kamli (Tina Munim) sings a very familiar sounding song about how all she wants is a home and lots of sweets to eat.

She gets her chance thanks to a chance encounter with arrogant, obsessive, misanthropic, but brilliant music professor Pratap (Dev Anand) and his affable best friend and sidekick Kashinath (Girish Karnad.) After Pratap compliments her voice, Kamli appears on his doorstep, offering the princely sum of five rupees a month if he will teach her music.

Pratap is so charmed by her chutzpah that he makes a bet with Kashinath: if Pratap can turn Kamli into a proper lady (there’s no mention of passing her off as a duchess at the embassy ball, but that’s the general idea) within six months, Kashinath will marry her. Kashinath agrees, so Pratap gets to work. After a few initial setbacks, Kamli makes remarkable progress both musically and culturally, while Pratap unwittingly grows accustomed to her face.

Man Pasand is one of the very few Bollywood remakes which is less complicated than the original. Rather than adding extensive backstory, the film trims the character list and streamlines the plot. The story translates to Bollywood well; the marriage clause in the initial bet is probably the biggest change, and it really just gives Kashinath the opportunity for romantic self sacrifice. The other major change is the characterization of Kamli’s father Popatlal (Mehmood), who comes across as a drunken parasite rather than a charming rogue, and does not get married in the morning.

Taken on its own, Man Pasand is a charming bit of light romantic fluff which explores a deeply unhealthy relationship, as charming bits of light romantic fluff tend to do. Dev Anad’s Pratap is perhaps the cuddliest misogynist in cinematic history, and while Tina Munim is no Audrey Hepburn, she combines a remarkable girl-next-door charm with both cheerful bravado and righteous outrage. If you’re familiar with My Fair Lady, though, Man Pasand is especially fun; the adaptation is so blatant and shameless and gleeful that you can often guess the characters’ next lines.

This year, instead of Shahrukh, I’ll leave you with the wit and wisdom of Mr. T.

I’m looking at a busy weekend, so no new review this week. We’ll be back to business as usual next week.