Bajrangi Bhaijaan(2015): Salman Khan has achieved a miracle beyond the blockbusters he churns out every Eid . This time in the very aptly titled Bajrangi Bhaijaan Salman has actually slipped into a character named Pavan Chaturvedi . And he remains there.All through.
Rarely have we seen Salman stay in character throughout the film. The last time he played a character and not ‘Salman Khan’ was in Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger .There he kept slipping in and out of character.
Not this time, buddy! Not in Bajrangi Bhaijaan. What we see on screen is an avatar of the innocent God-fearing upright and honest ‘Prem’ from Sooraj Barjatya’s cinema, a Hanuman Bhakt whose selfrighteousness would have been boring had it been played by any other star-actor.
We could say Salman plays the Son of Prem in Bajrangi Bhaijaan.And let’s not waste any more time in saying… this is Salman’s career’s most accomplished performance to date, heartfelt passionate and emotional, as he takes charge of a little girl’s travel plans back to her home in Pakistan.
Barbed fences, and other man-made barriers crumble to the ground as our Hanuman-bhakt hero perches the cutest girl ever seen in cinema on his back and sets off to find her home.
It’s an ingenious premise for a film plot, beautifully designed and executed and offering a panoramic view of the beauty that is India. Diretor Kabir Khan doesn’t waste time in congratulating himself and his superstar hero for chancing on such an endearing plotline. There is very little concession to preening and posturing in this emotionally fluent story of a adventurous and exciting journey, a pilgrimage, to ensure little Munni, heartbreakingly vulnerable fortified from all extraneous threats by the baap of all super-heroes, gets home.
So what makes Salman character-driven this time? Is it the company he keeps? His co-actors Kareena Kapoor Khan in the first-half playing his persistent love-interest, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the second-half as a small-time morally confused journalist who helps Bajrangi find a way to get into Pakistan without going through the formalities. Both Kareena and Nawaz do their roles with lip-smacking relish.
But it’s little Harshaali Malhotra , with her lucid articulate eyes speaking more than words ever can,who steals the show . The little girl is a natural-born performer. Her rapport with Mr Khan is so natural and real they soon begin to look like father and daughter on screen.
The parting of this twosome at the end will break your heart, as it is meant to.
Bajrangi Bhaijaan is all about heart. Its emotional quotient is so high and the storytelling so unassuming and transparent that the director’s integrity becomes the touchstone by which we weigh the film’s mellowly executed message on peace and amity across the border.
Some years ago for Eid Salman got together with Kareena Kapoor for that dreadful film Bodyguard. We forgive the pair their earlier faux pas. Bajrangi Bhaijaan will be recorded in the history of Indian cinema as a work that demolishes man-made borders without overt melodrama or aggressive rhetorics.
This is an all-out mass entertainer. But it doesn’t need to shout to get attention. That’s the beauty of watching Salman transform into the most secular hero of our times.
Salman isn’t asking for our approval. He does what he thinks is right. He walks the lonely path.And when he reaches he destination we stand up and applaud . But we aren’t sure whom we are applauding for. The leading man for getting so deeply involved with his character’s conviction. Or the director for creating cinema that generates bonhomie positivity warmth and affection without straining for effect.
This Eid, go and spend 2 ½ hours with this amazing character called Bajrangi Bhaijaan. Rest assured, you’ll never again peer across the barbed fence with suspicion again.
Masaan(2015): Varanasi….The land of the holy waters and… unholy deeds. Debutant director Neeraj Ghaywan mixes the stench of decadent corruption with the aroma of a newly awakening generation that wants to escape the stagnant spiritualism of a city whose holy waters are polluted beyond redemption.
And yet there is a magic to the city of Varanasi, an inescapable magic. As the goodhearted ticket seller at the Varanasi railway station points out to the film’s tormented and hounded protagonist Devi(Richa Chadha, brilliant) more trains come to Varanasi than leave.
It is the kind of city that sucks you into its vortex and doesn’t give you the freedom to depart unless it’s by death. There are raw vivid scenes of burning ghats in the film whose scorching embers will singe the viewers’ soul forever.
Masaan is not an easy film to ingest. It sucks you into its world of characters doomed by caste and ruined by wrong choices. The two main protagonists are played by Richa Chadha and newcomer Vickey Kaushal , actors whose deep link with the middleclass helps them to manoeuvre their characters in and out of thre trauma and anguish that the under-privileged classes are perpetually subjected to.
Hence in the shocking beginning—and the brilliant screenplay by Varun Grover and Ghaywan never leaves the shock element out of its purview till the very end—Devi(Chadha) is caught in a hotel room having sex.
Tauba! By succumbing to a basic need she subjects herself and her father(Sanjay Mishra, profoundly moving as a fast-fading river-bank priest and scholar) to the most crippling humiliation and blackmail by a bully cop(Bhagwan Tiwari, creepily real).
Richa plays Devi as a Fallen Woman with great dignity. Her scenes with her broken father moved me to tears, as it will move anyone who has ever been in a situation that has brought pain to a parent. Her journey and her encounter with a every strange and straightforward colleague(Pankaj Tripathy, splendid and memorable) are all brought together into a melancholic yet heartwarming saga of a small-town girl’s humiliation and redemption.
The other story that runs parallel to Devi’s saga is a tender and brutal love story where the caste system is smacked on its head before it proceeds to smack all of us in places where it hurts the most.
The young lovers played with an unspoilt naturalness by Vickey Kaushal and Shweta Thripathy, build an atmosphere of lulling gentleness around the plot that shatters to bits as the script moves to a zone of unexpected explosion.
Splintered lives shatter and mend in this penetrating portrait of lives lived on the edge Compelling and devastating, Masaan marks the remarkable directorial debut of Neeraj Ghaywan.The screenplay is strewn with unforgettable moments. My favourite , if you insist, is the sequence where Chadha, haunted and haunting, arrives in Allahabad to meet her boyfriend’s parents.
Here the camera reverently stays outside the location of the drama. We only hear the raised voices inside.It is enough to chill our soul.
In my other favourite sequence that actor par excellence Sanjay Mishra and a little boy share a moment of life in a hospital in a city where death is just a ghat away.
Avinash Arun’s cinematography makes the cremation ground look lyrical . Poetry, let me tell you, is a source of constant mockery in the film. The young innocent lovers in the film begin to discover the poet in themselves when a freak accident sinks their ardour into the deep-end.
“Yeh dukh kam nahin hota,” a young heartbroken man screams in a moment of unbearable anguish.I swear, at that moment I lost part of me to the film forever.
Never in recent times have I seen a film that rips such a gaping hole in our soul.
Masaan is a film that takes more away from viewers than perhaps we we are willing to give away. It leaves us with no choice but to surrender our soul to its vision of a world where grief and bereavement are the incontrovertible home truths. The rest is transitory.
Masaan is great great great film. Not to be missed.
