Neerja(2016): Was Neerja Bhanot, the airhostess who on 5 September 1986 perished while trying to save lives in a hijacked aircraft, really a Rajesh Khanna fan?In the film version of her life the zany feisty and exceptionally courageous(as we soon discover) Neerja Bhanot is a fanatical Rajesh Khanna fan…Or maybe fanatical is not a word we ought to use , considering…
10 minutes into the film, when we see Neerja dancing to Rajesh Khanna’s By bye miss goodnight from the film Premnagar, I wanted to believe in the reality about Neerja Bhanot that director Ram Madhvani and his ingenius writer Saiwyn Quadras has so diligently and faultlessly put across , immortalizing the memory of the slain braveheart even while giving Indian cinema yet another example of its growing maturity.
Neerja is a film that wears its excellence casually, like a beautifully knit garment thrown on for a stroll in a windy park. Turbulent weather is not quite the problem in this hijack drama(which is not really just that, but a lot , LOT,more). The entire nightmarish drama unfolds on the runway on a grounded aircraft.
The detailing of the PanAm flight is so exact(and full marks to production designer Aparna Sud), I didn’t for as moment feel I was on film set. From the moment the genial Neerja enters the flight(destined to be her last journey) I felt I was travelling with her, and all the crew members and passengers. The fact that we know how this heart-in-the-mouth drama will pan out doesn’t any way diminish our insurmountable anxiety , as four rabid Palestinians(played by impeccably cast actors) take over the flight from which our heroine will never return.
This fore-knowledge actually heightens our involvement and grief.When Neerja says goobye to her parents we know what they don’t.
It is her last goodbye.
As mentioned earlier, this is not a film a straightforward hijack drama. Director Ram Madhvani(returning to filmmaking after 14 years) weaves together some delicately drawn vignettes from Neerja’s past that recur unobtrusively while the ghastly crisis in the aircraft unfolds.
This is no minor achievement. Normally to have any kind of intrusion while the central crisis unfolds would be inexcusable. Full credit to Madhvani and his editor Monisha Baldwa for interweaving scenes from Neerja’s past while she tries to cope with a crisis that no airline training had prepared her for.Most vividly memories from a bad marriage with a husband pounding his way into her self-esteem and her father(played effectively by Yogendra Tikoo) prodding her on the phone to be a ‘bahaadur bachcha’ , recurs in the aircraft as the terrorists try to break down Neerja’s defences.
This could easily have turned into a cat-and-mouse game between a quartet of heinous villains and an over-smart female hero. The director takes the story to a level far higher than the heightened drama of a terror attack. This is the story of how crises create heroes. It is also about how this film about an unimaginable crisis created a hero called Sonam Kapoor.
Sonam, so far known for her impeccable dress sense, dresses and looks just as beautiful as she is expected to(so please don’t believe all the lies about how a good performance comes after taking off the makeup and the sartorial splendor). Looking every inch a diva (and uncannily like the real life Neera Bhanot) Sonam digs deep into her subconscious to express emotions that perhaps even she didn’t know existed within her. Not a moment of her joy (with her family) and fear(on the aircraft) are faked.
This is the performance where Sonam’s career actually begins. And to have the country’s most brilliant dramatic actress Shabana Azmi play her mother is just so providential. What Shabana has done to the role of Neerja’s mother is beyond the description of the maternal portrait we see in movies. Her eyes lose hope in front of us as the chances of her daughter coming home diminish. Shabana’s speech at her daughter’s first death anniversary will move even the most stone-hearted viewer to tears. There is an earlier sequence where she tells her son to stop crying for Neerja because ,make no mistake, she will return.
Shabana is right. Neerja has returned. This film brings her alive forever. It is the kind of muted homage to a hero that doesn’t blow bugles , eschews flamboyant flourishes and builds a welter of emotions from within the characters’ own subconscious rather than depend on extraneous trappings to simulate sentimentality. The background score by Vishal Khurana is so bare and minimal to be almost invisibly woven into the storytelling. Mitest Mirchandani’s camera looks into the eyes of the crisis fearlessly: the way Prasoon Joshi’s lucid lyrics prescribe.
There is not a single artiste or technician in Neerja who has bummed out on the job. A whole lot compassion and conviction have made a miracle of a movie called Neerja happen.
Kapoor & Sons(2016): Fawad Khan turns out to be gay in the plot . There. I said it. The family secret that unravels towards the end when…well, things falls apart and the centre cannot hold. Or so it seems. Until director Shakun Batra manages to make the loose ends come together in a messy kind of way that is so integral to the way families are.Never one. Ever always fun.All tangled in inter-personal relations,governed by emotions that they seldom understand.So who are we to judge them?
It was Leo Tolstoy who said it. “All happy families are alike.Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The family in Kapoor & Sons, played with magnificent eloquence by actors who know their job, is happy on the surface. But scratch the polished exterior, and you get frightening fissures.
It is up to the outsider who peers into the family scene to make some sense of what lies beneath.
And this Kapoor family—my God!—is not dysfunctional. It’s deliriously unhinged in its crisscross of unexplored emotions waiting to burst open in the eleventh hour.
First things first. Kapoor & Sons is not afraid to peer into the abyss of a family besieged by unresolved issues that tumble out towards the end with the urgency of a drama that must be played out before time runs out.Shakun Batra and his co-writer Ayesha Devitre Dhillon conceive a family tree that never gets over-burdened by over-statement.The narrative allows the “tragedy of an unhappy family” to play out non-laboriously, giving the characters a chance to grow in ways that they cannot control.
For a film laden with family secrets there is a surprising lack of opulent drama in the narrative. The conflicts are played out remarkably drained of melodrama but replete with a kind a dark wicked humour that we seldom experience in mainstream cinema.
There is this deviously written scene where a bewildered plumber tries to fix the kitchen sink while the entire family bickers loudly about its financial problems.
“How much do you want?” the family stops squabbling long enough to ask.
“Whatever you can afford,” whimpers the plumber desperate to make his getaway.We , providentially, never feel hemmed in by this family’s domestic distress which grows inwardly and finally implodes in scenes that run into each other towards the end in the way the life tends to outrun man-made plans.
There is a lot of naughty humour in the narrative emanating largely from Rishi Kapoor’s 90-going-on-19 patriarch’s character. Specially delicious is this real-life Kapoor’s ogling at Mandakini’s bare-breasted images from Raj Kapoor’s Ram Teri Ganga Maili.Of course the fact that Rishi Kapoor’s real-life father directed the erotic feast is a killer of an inhouse joke.
Rishi Kapoor is undoubtedly the show stopper and the scenestealer here, followed closely by Ratna Pathak Shah whose portrayal of the worn-out housewife desperately holding on to shreds of optimism is pitch-perfect.And Rajat Kapoor as the father fighting off financial and extra-marital problems, is sullen and subdued.
But after Rishi it is Fawad Khan as the family’s “perfect son”who is controlled and in command of his character’s troubled inner-world .Fawad effortlessly chews up Siddharth Malhotra in every scene that they appear together. Not that Malhotra doesn’t try. He does. But the effort shows each time Fawad is in the same frame.They play writer-brothers who have always been at loggerheads for reasons that appear silly and trivial. But that’s the nature of family secrets. They rip a relevance only in the discontinuity that creeps into family ties.
Alia Bhatt’s sunshine girl act is problematic. She is more annoying than cute. We are supposed to fawn over her character’s feyness. But her antics including kissing a man she has just met merits as borderline brazenness.As the only major character who is not part of the Kapoor family, Alia needed to justify her presence far more strongly .
The really strong moments in the film occur when Ratna Pathak Shah’s maternal allegiance is threatened by the revelation regarding her favourite son’s sexuality.No one mentions the taboo ‘g’ word. But the atmosphere crackles with nerve racking tension once Fawad’s secret is out of the closet. Here the narrative needed to give Ratna Shah and Fawad Khan more room to grapple. But there are other family crises to deal with, and sadly those are not half as gripping as this one.
Like the family its penetrates , Kapoor & Sons neither purports to be a perfect nor a seamless family drama. It does something far valuable. It takes all the flaws and imperfections of a dysfunctional family and transcreates them into a drama of muted grievances and unspoken recriminations.
And Rishi Kapoor’s ‘Daadu’ act makes you forgive all the flaws of immaturity evident in some of the pivotal performances.
“You know what they say about men with long noses?” Alia teases Malhotra.We all know what they say about girls who make phallic jokes just to appear cute. Never mind.
