PAT CASH
The New Sunday Express - March 12, 2006

The lure of easy money is the basis for a comedy that’s nowhere as high on the laugh-o-meter as you’d hope in something from Priyadarshan.


Picture courtesy: apunkachoice.com

Our movies are usually written around characters designed to push specific buttons in us. The mother usually exists to evoke tears. The father usually exists to explode in rage at his daughter’s falling in love with someone he doesn’t approve of, thus making us feel a similar rage at his stubbornness in keeping the young lovers apart. The hero’s best friend usually exists to amuse (with his corny one-liners) as well as inspire us (with his loyalty), the teeth-gnashing villain usually exists to elicit hate in us, and so on. But the characters in a Priyadarshan comedy – by now a genre unto itself – exist for one and one thing only: to propel us into the next comic set piece, the next sight gag, the next plot strand that will pay off with the next big laugh. Their reason for being, in other words, isn’t emotion so much as forward motion.

That’s why it’s easy to sit through even something as hit-and-miss as Malamaal Weekly. There’s a huge, huge cast at work here (Paresh Rawal, Om Puri, Asrani, Ritesh Deshmukh, Reema Sen, Rajpal Yadav, Rasika Joshi, Sudha Chandran, Shakti Kapoor, Arbaaz Khan, Innocent), and the actors appear to be the big-screen equivalent of relay runners; they show up, race through their stretch, then instantly pass the baton to the next-in-line. Save for some ill-advised detours into tear-jerker territory – mercifully short, though – there’s not a moment of slack in the screenplay by Priyadarshan. So even if you’re not terribly amused, you barely have the time to reflect on the missed opportunity of the present scenario, because the next scenario has already begun playing.

And to be fair, some of these scenarios do work, especially when they’re the kind that involve one man raising a club to strike someone from behind, only to have someone else raising a club to strike him from behind, and that someone else has yet another club-raiser behind, and ad infinitum. (Why is it that the least sophisticated gags always evoke the most belly laughs?) And the story of Malamaal Weekly allows for several such bits of mayhem; it’s about villagers who whip themselves into a frenzy to get a share of the loot when a neighbour wins the grand prize in a lottery and dies without claiming the money. (The film opens with the song Sun mere mitwa, nadiya kinare ek gaon re, and we see a priest entering a temple at daybreak, a procession of bullock carts, a man bathing by a well, a fishing net cast into a pond and making that near-circle as it hits the water... It’s a beautifully-shot mini-montage of the clichés we associate with our villages, and it almost – almost – made me forget that what follows is essentially a reworking of a movie set in a village in Ireland: Waking Ned Devine.)

But I couldn’t help wishing for more in a film that pairs not just two of my favourite actors, but two of my favourite comic actors. (In case you’re wondering about Om Puri and comedy, I have two words for you: Chachi 420. Actually, I have four more words for you: Kyun! Ho Gaya Na, where Om was simply delightful as Vivek Oberoi’s father.) After all, this is as monumental a teaming as, say, Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra in Chupke Chupke – two major stars from the commercial circuit there; two major actors from the art circuit here – and the resulting movie doesn’t do either of them justice. Still, it’s nice to see that something like this was made at all, to know that a producer would bankroll a film featuring these veterans without the prop of a conventional box-office lead (like Akshay Kumar in Hera Pheri, or Akshaye Khanna in Hulchul and Hungama). That thought filled me with more cheer than anything else in Malamaal Weekly.


AWE PAIR
The New Sunday Express - February 26, 2006

A terrific teaming of a down-on-his-luck cabbie and a superrich society type makes for an extremely satisfying drama.


Picture courtesy: apunkachoice.com

Nana Patekar is shockingly awful in Taxi No. 9211. He’s over-the-top, he’s hammy, he’s... I’m sorry, I can’t do this. But the man, of late, has been delivering one knockout performance after another, and I’m running out of gushy things to write about him. But I’ll say this much. He’s so magnificent here – just watch him when, rotting in jail, he wryly recalls his thumbs-up star forecast for the day – that John Abraham, playing off him, actually comes up with a counter-performance. For the first time, John isn’t just a clotheshorse; he’s a man whose life is spiralling scarily out of control.

And Milan Luthria’s Taxi No. 9211 is all about lives spiralling out of control. It’s the kind of fever-pitched drama where the people in it aren’t characters as much as cue balls ricocheting off one another, spinning off in random directions that make their stories seem less a film than fate. This theme is underlined early on, when Sanjay Dutt, in a characteristically Mumbaiya voiceover, narrates the backstories of the protagonists. (An unseen narrator who knows all about the leads, even about things that haven’t yet happened to them – that’s pointing towards fate, right?)

Cabbie Raghav Shastri (Nana Patekar) picks up richie-rich businessman’s son Jai Mittal (John Abraham), who’s in a hurry to get to court to contest a will. Both have money problems; Raghav’s is that he doesn’t make enough, and Jai’s is that his father’s made more than enough but has willed it all to someone else. In both cases, if they don’t act quickly, they could end up losing everything. Jai could lose his crores, and Raghav could lose his wife (a superb Sonali Kulkarni) and kid. And you slowly see that if they hadn’t been from opposite sides of the tracks, they could almost be the same person.

And as the only thing that seems to be separating them is the fact that they’re from opposite sides of the tracks, they blame precisely that when things go wrong. Raghav gets into an accident and blames Jai – well, maybe not Jai in particular, but the class of people Jai represents. So he sets out to make life hell for Jai, who, similarly, thinks it’s Raghav who’s responsible for the way his day is turning out – well, maybe not Raghav in particular, but the class of people Raghav represents. So he sets out to make life hell for Raghav. And it’s soon clear that they’ll go at each other’s throats until they learn that the other is, you know, a person too – that is, Jai may be a rich boy, but he’s still a poor-little-rich-boy, and Raghav may be a short-tempered lout, but he’s still, well, Nana Patekar. You can’t help loving him.

That could well be the message of Taxi No. 9211, that all you need is love – for your fellow-man, and from your woman. (Not for nothing does Kishore’s hit from Lahu Ke Do Rang underscore a key feel-good moment: Chahiye thoda pyar, thoda pyar chahiye.) Jai has a sexy girlfriend (Sameera Reddy), but it’s the relationship between Nana Patekar and Sonali Kulkarni that spells out what love is all about. They don’t have many scenes together, but we’ve seen so many movies set in chawls – Katha, Tera Mera Saath Rahen – and we’ve seen so many instances of married life in these cramped quarters that we already guess what they mean to each other. When Sonali decides to leave Nana, she explains her reasons to him while wordlessly making sure he has something to eat for at least a day or two. That’s all we need to know why Raghav’s losing her means much more than Jai’s losing his crores.

It may be too early to say this, but after Bluffmaster and now Taxi No. 9211, we may be witnessing the birth of a new kind of commercial cinema: The Ramesh Sippy Production. As director, Sippy blazed an impressive all-India trail with Sholay and the underappreciated Shakti, but as producer, his focus seems to be narrower – he’s trying to redefine masala for the multiplex generation. Both Bluffmaster and Taxi No. 9211 are full of split screens, fades to full colour, fancy wipes, the loving use of Mumbai as not just a location but a character, the sparing but judicious use of a supercool Vishal-Shekhar score (like Bluffmaster’s Right Here Right Now, there’s a beautifully-staged music video treat at the end here, Meter Down), and if the basic premise in either film isn’t entirely original – Changing Lanes provides the template here – it’s been adapted, given enough local colour and flavour to make each its own movie.

But these are just surface similarities. Where you feel really happy for having forked out full fare to watch Taxi No. 9211 is in the way it makes a potentially-preachy life-lesson movie such an entertaining ride. Not for a minute are you aware of being talked down to, but if you think about it, the last scenes are all you need to know that sometimes happy endings in the movies are very similar to happy endings in real life. They don’t just happen because a scriptwriter stuck them in; they happen because the characters work, work and work their way towards them. I don’t think I’ve seen a happy ending in a while that felt this earned.