Aamir(2008): This is by far one of the finest attempts in recent times to explore the psyche of a modern ‘foreign-returned’ Indian as he’s plunged headlong into the Kafkaesque nightmare of crime grime extremism and fanaticism in the underbelly of that big bright and bewildering city known as Mumbai. A Swades on skids hurling down into an abyss of unpatriotic instigations.
From the moment Aamir(Rajeev Khandelwal) touches down on Mumbai’s international airport, what assails you is that overpowering sense of an individual’s struggle to survive in a pitiless and often unforgiving city.
That debutant director Rajkumar Gupta is able to muster a fair amount of smiles and chuckles in this tale of one day in the life of a man caught in a nightmare that even Kafka would find hard to create let alone condone, is entirely providential.
Aamir could’ve easily slipped into being a heavyhanded polemical study of the isolation and persecution of the Indian Muslim and his constant battle to remain part of the mainstream even as he’s provoked and instigated from both ends to keel over and surrender to forces of chaos anarchy and annihilation.
Ironically a work of art like Aamir embraces the chaos to create a universe that is in a strange a stirring way, the opposite of destruction.
Persistently, Aamir repeatedly invokes images of ominous doom as we see the protagonist wind his way through a dreadful day that would end in abject tragedy .
The taut and tense narration finds supreme sustenance from its outdoors. Indeed apart from Khandelwal and his portrayal of the the reluctant hero, the real protagonist of Aamir is Mumbai city.
The crowded congested chawls and gullis, the reek of deprivation and the stench and sweat of anxiety assail your semses in a way that we last saw in Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday.
Squalor seldom seemed so splendidly evocative. As the protagonist winds his way through a day in the city that would lead to his inevitable doom, the camera captures crowds of bored bystanders and curious passersby looking at our man on the run with a tell-tale red briefcase….or shall we call it the grief case?…in his sweaty hands.
First-time cinematographer Alphons Roy has done to Mumbai what most movies set on the city have not. He has made Mumbai at once the perpetrator and victim of a socio-political perversity that goes beyond crime and punishment.
Editor Aarti Bajaj cuts the film with a ruthlessness that echoes the film’s subliminal mood. . There’s no room in the narration for question marks. Every shot is punctuated by an exclamation mark, every moment means a move forward to an unknown destination. Every glance on the road seems to suggest danger. Every peep is a peril. It’s an amazingly constructed labyrinth of crime and commitment.
The narrative harnesses faces on the streets with the expertise of an unrehearsed trapeze artiste’s walk across a ragged rope. There’s very little to keep the plot from going over the precipice. And yet director Raj Kumar Gupta pulls it off with a full-throttle drama that leaves us gasping for breath.
Indeed, we’ve never seen a screen hero- run so fast and so relentlessly . Rajeev Khandelwal chases fugitive taxis and petty criminals through highways and gullis which stretch into acres of aching squalor. Physically and emotional taxing, the role gives Khandelwal a chance to make the kind of debut actors dream about in their worst nightmare.
The debutant doesn’t let go of his character for even a split second. From those skillfully shot long-shots of Aamir running on the highyways to those tight close-ups expressing hurt, anger anguish desperation and occasional gratitude(watch him when the prostitute helps him out , or towards the finale on the bus when looking out of the widow he thinks his ordeal has ended) Khandelwal knows what his job thoroughly.
There’re hordes of smaller actors, like Gajraj Rao barking orders into poor Aamir’s burning ears through a cellphone that has no outgoing calls. Only incoming fanaticism.
Aamir is that kind of a rare film which provides us food for thought without burdening us with calories of polemics and sermons on the quality of existence. The thriller element presides over the message.The disturbing undercurrents just flow out of the storywith a virile fluency .
At the end you aren’t watching a film about extremism but a rare take on life at the edge that doesn’t topple over into the abyss.
Jaane Tu…Ya Jaane Na(2008) : Abbas Tyrewala’s directorial debut has a certain sparkling spirit , a zest for living life quirk-sized and a certain zing thing about the way the characters look at life and love.
It’s not only about the way the characters’ exuberant yearnings connect with the audience. It’s also about the casual free-flowing downloading of events and dialogues in the narrative that give the characters an edge over other urbane youngsters who have come and gone in the past creating a spirit of lingering joie de vivre.
The bunch of collegians here take their cues from Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai, Rakeysh Mehra’s Rang De Basanti and even Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Echoes from these iconic youth -films fill out the outer edges of the ‘cool’ canvas creating for the characters at-hand a sense of wondrous and informal perpetuity as they go from humorous heartbreak to sober selfrealization in a plot that accommodates both impulse and pre-meditated thought in a mix that is engaging endearing and fairly original in spite of the derivative echoes.
While the supporting cast of friends are both real and tangible , at the core of this romantic musical are Jai(Irfan Khan) and Aditi(Genelia) who are “best friends” in the coolest sense of the term. Bantering bum-chums at the surface but sharing a much deeper bond underneath , all their friends can see that the twosome is made for each other.
But they can’t.
It’s an exceedingly old formula for a romantic comedy given a fresh new spin by a storyteller who picks on moments from ordinary lives and converts them into a celebration of life and love.
Old songs(R.D Burman mainly) and new original music(A .R Rahman) coalesce with the minum fuss while Jai and Aditi’s love story goes through several turns and twists until they arrive at that traditional end-game for romantic films: the grand reunion at the airport seconds before the girl is scheduled to take off for good.
The flurry is charming ,though a little to selfconsciously designed at times.
Peep underneath . And you see the narration covering a lot of familiar ground.
The freshness lies in the way the characters respond to the familiar material often exceeding the domain created by the script.
Every actor pitches in at just the right volume of vivacity. There are stand-out supporting performances by Naseeruddin Shah(playing the hero Jai’s dead father in a portrait), Ratna Pathak(superbly skilled as Jai’s mom), Paresh Rawal( flawless as a boorish cop) and Arbaaz and Sohail Khan(as a couple of outlandish cowboys they supplant the believably urbane love story with a touch of the surreal).
Then there’s Manjrai Phadnis as the hero’s could-be love interest. Living in perpetual denial she thinks her embittered parents(Rajat Kapoor and Kitu Gidwani) actually love each other under the acrimony.
The characters never claim to be extraordinary in their desires. It’s their ordinary dreams and down-to-earth desires which give the narration a spirited spin.
And then there are protagonists. Not just young Imran Khan and Genelia. But their friends. Each one played as though the wall dividing the actor from the characters had disappeared.
While Genelia is a natural in most scenes, Imran’s unassuming boy-next-door personality lends itself with picture-perfect precision to the mood and tenor of the narration.
Here’s a young actor who has a long innings ahead. He doesn’t think before he acts.
It’s not about how deep he goes into his character. It’s more about how much at home he’s occupying the space provided by the script.
The same is true of the other actors.
Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na exudes an urbane cool. It’s not really trying to be anything. It doesn’t have an earthshattering message for the masses.
What it has is an honest story about a bunch of credible characters told in a fashion that’s casually trendy and warm. Manoj Lobo’s cinematography and Shan Mohamed’s editing assist the director in making this a film that you’d probably like to watch again just to see if you missed out a vital bit of the characters’ lives while they were looking for love.
Mumbai Meri Jaan(2008): Nishikant Kamat went too early. It is rare for a film based on a gruesome traumatic real-life tragedy to be made into a film where every character and almost every episode and moment is etched out with unwavering care sensitivity and resonance.
Mumbai Meri Jaan is that rare gem of a film that makes your heart bleed, your eyes cry and your spritis soar in hope for a better tomorrow . Even as it makes your heart sink as fictional characters emerge from the horrific rubble of the train blasts that shook Mumbai on July 11, 2005, the reverberant drama brings to us moments that redeem the rapidly -disintegrating status of our society.
Mumbai Meri Jaan is unarguably the best-written film of this year. All the principal characters are designed to represent real life and yet convey significances that take them beyond sensationalistic newspaper headlines.
Whether we live in Mumbai or not, each one of us is bound to find a bit of ourselves in one or the other of the protagonists.
There’s Soha Ali Khan giving a career-defining performance as a hard-nosed television journalist who finds herself on the other side of the ‘offence’ when her boyfriend goes missing after the blast. This is a terrific terrifying and intimate study of irony and ambition, done is striking strokes of black and ‘fright’.
Or take the Madhavan track. He’s white-collar idealist who travels by train and almost gets killed in the blasts for his democratic principles. Madhavan brings a searching agony to his eyes , as suspicion and terror take hold of his heart creating situations in the script that are poignant and funny.
Funniest in its savage cruelty is the jobless loiterer KayKay Menon’s suspicious trailing of a Muslim youth to a mosque…only to discover that the guy was is to meet his girlfriend. Paresh Rawal(does he ever stop being brilliant?) as the jaded cop in conversation with the young spirited colleague(Vijay Mourya) would remind you of Nana Patekar and Nakul Vaid in Ab Tak Chappan.
Hold that thought…There’s a treasury of thoughtprovoking challenging and deeply moving moments in Mumbai Meri Jaan to remind us how engaging cinema can be without sacrificing the message.
My favourite moment besides Soha’s obviously impressive breakdown sequence is the one where the Muslimphobic KayKay Menon –character accosts a poor old Muslim bread seller on the night after the blast.
Even as such sequences make us cringe we applaud the power of cinema to convey home truths in caustic and comic coatings.
With exceptional candour and emotion writer Yogesh Vinayak Joshi weaves in and out of the lives of the irreparably wounded characters(and we aren’t talking physical damage) . Whether it’s the look of bewilderment pain and shock in Madhavan’s eyes as he sees his limbless friend in hospital after the blasts, or Irrfan’s look of triumph after he creates a false bomb scare in a shoppingmall where he was insulted, Mumbai Meri Jaan discovers and celebrates the deep cleft between the haves and the have-nots .
Each of the 5 principal performances are outstanding in their sensitivity and warmth. And it would be criminal to single any of them out.
Seldom have we seen such a showcase of brilliant writing, , directing acting and communicating the power of cinema in all its glory. Nishikant, we miss you.
