Rock On (2008):You know there’s great skill involved in the way the characters are interwoven into a pastiche of the past pain and the present gained. But the craft never shows up on screen.In essence what we see in Rock On!! is that cliché called a slice-of-life cinema turned inside –out. The story of four musicians who have given up their true vocation in pursuit of routine ambitions, is nothing new
The inspirational muscles grow into the plot through the subtle treatment of the characters, each crying from within without making a song and dance of their emotions….unless we’re talking about the robust rock soundtrack created by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy where the rhythms just blow your mind .The music manifests the protagonists’ emotions in a tangential light.
But the on-stage energy, so capably choreographed and captured on film, is a very small part of the film’s epic design.
The stage where we see Farhan, Arjun, Luke and Purab(more about them later) come together and then fall apart is actually a metaphor for the podium of existence where life for this quartet of closet-musicians plays out a cruel game of hide and shriek.
For a film where wounded hearts bleed profusely there’s very little melodrama in the treatment.
Director Abhishek Kapoor prefers understatement to bellowing out the message. The film brims over with un-italicized dramatic tensions. And that’s where Farhan scores as an actor. He is equally at ease expressing the angst of a thwarted musician and a husband whose sweet caring near-angelic wife(Prachi Desai ,in a made-to-fit debut) leaves no stones unturned to bring back a smile to her husband’s face.
The other marriage between the frustrated embittered musician Arjun Rampal and his tirelessly slogging wife Shahana Goswami(doing a Yoko Ono from John Lennon’s life-story with a career-making volcanic performance) is trickier. Here we see how the narration dodges and hops over the potholes of pedestrianism, and converts the trite into the timeless by making the human relationships obtainable rather than obtuse.
The characterizations are first -rate. These people (ever met them?) are all casualties of suburban paranoia brought into the frames of a film that requires no camera lenses to locate the strengths and foibles in their personality. We don’t need to pinpoint their pain and passion. We accept them as they are.
Covering a much wider distance than the acres covered by Dil Chahta Hai, Rock On!! simply (and I do mean simply) redefines the human-interest drama by creating a plot that accommodates the highest notes in the range of human emotions without straying into shrillness…quite like the sweet Prachi Desai who sings Lata Mangeshkar’s Ajeeb dastaan hai yeh with disarming innocence and sincerity in a film where rock music is the propelling factor.
Aligned with pain and passion, Rock On!! avoids the shrill will by restraining the characters from building their anguish into an eruptive release. Every character builds his own hell and comes out of it without a discernible yell.
Jason West’s cinematography makes special place for the heart in his art. While on the polished surface we see the glisten of sweat and the trickle of a tear intangibly, the camera shoots the sets in a light that constantly reflects the characters’ inner world.
And the seamless editing(Deepa Bhatia) fuses the past into the present in a way that makes time appear to be a pivotal but unobtrusive character in the plot.
The performances are all so apt you wonder if any other actor could have achieved so much with such austere lucidity. Farhan Akhtar believes in the less-is-more theory giving his role of the band’s lead singer all he has got without tripping over the scale.
Purab Kohli(earlier an accomplished presence in My Brother Nikhil) imparts an impish cockiness to the drummer’s part while first-time actor Luke Kenny as the dying keyboards plays is poignant without bringing on the violins.
But the truly revealing performance comes from Arjun Rampal. As the embittered guitarist clinging to family and music with desperate bravado, his eyes convey a wealth of pain and hurt.
Where had you kept all this angst hidden, Arjun?
And we may well ask director Abhishek Kapoor the same question. Nothing Kapoor has done in his inglorious past prepares for the sheer guttural glory and power of Rock On!!
A Wednesday(2008): Debutant director Neeraj Pandey turns the grim reality of terrorism into an engaging game of cat – and – mouse played between a master blaster(Naseruddin Shah) and a senior cop(Anupam Kher). They hardly meet. They don’t need to.
Just the pleasure of watching Shah and Kher play out a cat-and-mouse game against the backdrop of a teeming bustling sinisterly jeopardized Mumbai city, is ample reason to discard all our other misgivings about the sheer feasibility of the plot.
Pandey’s taut screenplay goes to one of Hollywood’s oldest scripting formats… The law-enforcing hero in clenched and clinching conversation with the brilliant antagonist who enjoys teasing and provoking the hero into a wild and breathless chase.
Frankly, so do we. Though on this occasion the physical exertions of the cop and the terrorist are somewhat limited by their growing years.
Cleverly the narration manoeuvres all the physical action away from the two aging protagonists to a couple of hotblooded young cops played effectively by Jimmy Sheirgill and Aamir Bashir who hurl into camera range in a meteoric rush of adrenaline to remind us that the streets of Mumbai have always created a flutter in the clutter in our films. Just go back to every film from Satya to Aamir and see what we mean.
Cinematographer Fuwad Khan captures the whoosh of steroid-driven blood on the roads of Mumbai with a disaffected relish . A lot of the film has been shot in stylish top-shots where the characters’ terrorists and counter-terrorist manoeuvrings appear larger than life and yet miraculously shrunken in the cosmic scheme of things. Violence in this way is made both comic and cosmic.
It’s a master-stroke to have Naseeruddin Shah bark out his extremist orders to his cop-ally from the rooftop of an under-construction building. From where this crypric caller with explosive news stands we see Mumbai in a vertiginous light, filled with ominous sights and sounds.
Most of the film cracks the entertainment code through the ongoing dialogue between the cop and the master-blaster, quite in Clint Eastwood and John Malvokich in Wolfgang Petersen’s In The Line Of Fire, triggering off a thought-provoking chain of ideas on the common man and terrorism and how far the violence of extremism affects the self –worth of the middleclass.
The closing lap of the edge-of-the-seat why-dunnit is a clever plot-defining twist , perhaps too clever for its own good. For, what we get here is terrorism turned inside-out, the anguish of extremism facing upside-down. It’s an interesting but unacceptable end-game, more suited to Quentin Tarantino when all the while we were looking at Neeraj Pandey’s film as belonging to Mahesh Bhatt’s genre of cinema .
By the time Naseer’s eruptive enthusiasm climaxes the narration goes into the realm of the improbable, contriving to create an atmosphere of utter escapism in a film that you thought was stubbornly wedded to reality.
But that’s the way the writer-director Neeraj Pandey has been heading all along. His narrative hurls towards a photo-finish where the newspaper headlines are swallowed up in a swamp if thriller-rituals that take the plot aback to create an aura of unstoppable suspense.
Sanjoy Chowdhury’s background music over-punctuates every sequence . But then that’s precisely what this out-of-the-box terrorist-thriller was looking for.
The humour, when it strikes, is like the bomb blasts. Sudden and unexpected, though a little on the grimmer side. Veejay Gaurav Chopra as a shit-scared film star getting extortion calls is mousy enough to remind us that heroes don’t out of the movies. But heroic movies surely do come along once in a while from the movie industry. A Wednesday is certainly one of them.
Watch it to see how cleverly the director subverts the real-life headline-driven genre of cinema into a riveting race to the finish line.
Most of all it’s the performances of the two principal actors that holds A Wednesday together. Moving away from his recent comic antics Anupam Kher delivers a controlled bridled performance as a cop who has seen it all. He happily allows Naseeruddin Shah to take over many scenes giving his co-star some riveting reactive cues.
Naseeruddin Shah is back in full form after a rather embarrassing gap of cameo-commitments. Naseer in his element is an experience that needs no definition. He plays the jaded but spirited bomb –planting anonymous caller with a wry blunt and edgy sardonic ism creating for his character a space that pitches his angst in the wide-open loosely-defined crowds of desolation in Mumbai.
Naseer doesn’t play this twisted ideologue for any sympathy. He gives this average middleclass man just the right shades of bruised and wounded consciousness .
A Wednesday is not quite the seamless little masterpiece on terrorism that you expected. It resorts to many wild swipes in the plot. Some characters like the dude-like computer hacker and the tv journalist (played by Deepal Shaw) give embarrassing single-note performance.
In fact I could see no difference in that one doleful expression that Ms Shaw gives to her characters in A Wednesday and Chamku last week.
Maybe there’s a message here. True brilliance is often better-defined when located in mediocrity. Watch Naseer and Anupam to know how a one-to-one drama works when two actors provide an psychological and emotional equilibrium from the two ends of the moral spectrum.
Heroes(2008): Portions of this episodic film are pure genius, sparkling with the unshed tears of a mother whose child has died before she could hold it in her arms and nurture it.
Here’s a piece of cinema that we need to stand and applaud for its idealism , its absolute absence of cynicism in telling a story that invites the conscience to cry for a country and global society that can’t think beyond its own nose.
But wait. Heroes is not a flag-waving exercise propagating the join-the-army message.
Yes, to begin with , the film does put forward that message . So did Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya. But that’s another story.
But soon enough you journey across the toughest Indian terrain of intense warmth and acute cold in pursuit of a dream that transcends the nightmare of everyday existence .And you realize Heroes is about bereavement and how to cope with it without getting cynical about sloganeering subjects like patriotism and desh-bhakti.
To a wife in Punjab who copes with a child and her dead soldier’s parents on her own, or a wheelchaired soldier who has lost his kid brother to war, or to an aging couple coping with the death of their only son to war, does it matter if the country needs to be protected from outside aggression?
The answer to the question is not provided in rhetorics and sermons but in the course of the vivid journey that takes our two narrators Sohail and Vatsal Sheth to the heart of the country.
Heroes follows suit. It’s shot on location in the hearts of characters who are wounded by war without going to the battle friend.
This isn’t the first film about the war bereaved coping with their loss . At times Heroes is redolent of J.P Dutta’s Border and LOC Kargil….those homesick soldiers writing those lovelorn letters from the battlefront , the battery of war vehicles winding their way through the mountainous terrain, the soldiers coming home in coffins…
Yup, we’ve seen it all before. But director Samir Karnik succeeds in taking the theme of social responsibility patriotism and soldierly duties far beyond the clichés.
Some interludes woven into the multitude of grieving characters’ lives are heartstopping in their poetic lucidity. The look in Preity’s eyes when she hold her dead husband’s letter in her trembling hands, or much much later when our two narrators reach a snowcapped salvation and travel in a vehicle loaded with coffins of war martyrs…or Mithun Chakraborty’s breakdown before his dead son’s picture….dude, this is not an ordinary cinematic happening!
Heroes connects with us in ways that are emotional and spiritual. Often while you watch the characters live through a devastating loss, you feel the screenwriter, dialogue writer and director breathe a vigorous life into the scenes by harnessing and articulating feelings that threaten to be washed by tears.
Karnik goes for an emotional understatement even when he’s at liberty to pull out all stops. All three segments of bereavement and reconciliation are designed with a great deal of emotional honesty and clamped intensity. If one has to pick a favourite it would have to be the first overture in journey where Vatsal-Sohail meet the brave Punjabi war widow.
Disappearing into herself to emerge with a character who is ramrod-straight and dignified in her tragedy , Preity Zinta gives the film’s best performance…and that’s saying a lot in film scattered with sensitive portrayals.
Preity’s eyes convey aeons of dignified pain.
Effortlessly and persuasively Katnik goes from pure emotionalism to unstoppered populism. Watch Sunny Deol’s fight in the pub where he swings into full-fledged action from a wheelchair.
This is what the junta would call a full paisa-vasool sequence.
It’s astonishing how the director uses full-blown commercial actors to play characters who touch emotions that are generally denied access in our mainstream cinema.
Besides Preity, Sunny Deol(more for his character’s packaging than basic performance) and Mithun Chakbraborty , the child actor Dwij Yadav Sohail Khan leave the strongest impression. Vatsal Sheth’s rawness goes well with his spoilt-rich-coming-of-age character, a sort of Hrithik Roshan from Lakshya on wheels.
The actors are supported by locations that ooze the emotions of the characters in the right shades of life.
The two cinematographers Binod Pradhan and Gopal Shah create stirring echoes of spiritual and emotional majesty without letting the colour schemes become over-representational.
Throughout , the narrative retains the rhythms and emotions of life, never letting go of the threads that bind humanity to the suffering that comes with the existential territory.
The conversations convey both the reality of real life and the richness of a life that exists beyond the mundane motions of everyday chit-chat.