Pyaar Ka Punchnama(2011): A star is born.And his name is Kartik Aaryan.
Pyaar Ka Punchnama which completed 10 years on May 20, packs in a precocious punch. In telling the story of three friends/flat-mates who get into ‘serious’(read: doomed) relationships with three self-serving working-class female monsters of the concrete jungle, debutant director Luv Ranjan gives us a film that’s fresh,flavourful and finally hugely rewarding.
Not that the film attempts to say anything we’ve not seen before. That’s the beauty of this sometimes-embarrassing sometimes-disturbing, often-funny and never-dull peek-a-boo at youthful life in the metropolis where human values are frequently sacrificed for the sake of a trendy lifestyle…Or maybe just to get even with a fast-moving materialistic city that doesn’t care how much you carry in your heart as long as the credit-cards keep working their mall magic.
Meet Rajat(Kartik Aaryan) who,alas, meets Riya .And his life changes forever.Wish we could say, for better. In terms of an emotional graph and dramatic momentum, Kartik is the screenplay’s most appealing and inviting character.That the actor plays his character with great gusto just adds to the charm of the proceedings.
No doubt the Rajat-Riya track conveys echoes of the Saif Ali Khan-Suchitra Pillai lamb-and-bully equation in Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai.
It’s not novelty for which this film wins extra points.It’s the sheer energy exuberance and sardonic humour that the director invests into building a case against young men in the city ‘falling’(with a humping thud) in love with girl so ambitious they would climb the highest peak at the slightest pretext.And we aren’t talking about the Himalayas.
Though there’s a delectable sexual subtext to the relationships director Luv Ranjan keeps the proceedings surprisingly free of crassness.The vast eclectic material is nimbly edited in a criss-cross of fast-moving vignettes taken from a suburban immorality-tale.
Apart from an inexplicable fixation on urination in the dialogues of the first reel(maybe the script wanted to make a moot point?) the spoken lines communicate the musk of masculine prattle without getting over- lurid or picturesque.
For a first film Luv Ranjan shows a remarkable grip over his characters’ destiny. If Rajat’s track moves at a vibrant volition the nerdy Liquid(Divyendu Sharma)’s one-sided devotion to the selfish office colleague Charu(Ishita) reeks of a desperate romance that Somerset Maugham described in his novel Of Human Bondage decades ago. More recently we saw Omi Vaidya do the hangdog Romeo in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Dil To Bachcha Hai Jee.
The new actor Divyendu who plays Liquid is a solid actor. He gives to his wimpy cranky character an easily-recognizable profile.
The plot involving Chaudhary(Raayo Bhakhirta) and his promiscuous lust-interest is the feeblest of the three love-tracks. And it suffers only in comparison with the sturdy momentum that the director allots to Rajat and Liquid’s rather sordid love stories.
Deftly written and edited with words and situations straight out of real life Pyaar Ka Punchnama is the kind of rugged rom-com that brings the smile back into the genre.The performances specially by Kartik and Divyendu are rock-solid, imbuing the light-hearted but never-frivolous goings-on with flavour and strength .Kartik’s 4-min-45-second improvised monologue on how confusing feminine conduct gets for the male species is priceless in its piquancy.
Peppery and pertinent,this is a film that no one should miss.True,it is a story about the below-the-belt follies of the young. No matter what your age you will see a slice of your own spousal relationship in the vicious circle that the plot creates around its three heroes.
The ultimate horror flick? You got it. This one is about how scary the man-woman thing gets because most of the time men don’t know what women want .You see,woman don’t want men to know.That’s the secret this devilishly-delightful film lets out.
Shaitaan(2011): The skilful interweavement of strong storytelling and powerful performances(where do all these talented youngsters come from?!) is underpinned by a wild sense of humour that shows up at the oddest of places to remind us that cinema is not about following all the punctuation rules of storytelling. It’s about knowing when and where to revv up the drama to just that right pitch of crescendo to carry us into a tripped-out world of hedonism and redemption.
This stunning tale of five misguided youngsters(no relation to Anurag Kashyap’s Paanch, as reported) from the uppercrust displays a flair for unleashing an energy that leaves us breathless with anticipation. It’s tough to keep up with the film’s unbridled zest for momentum. From the opening montages showing poignant scenes from the Kalki’s character childhood with her troubled mother, to the dying moments when the five protagonists are rendered either dead or damned or both, this work of pop-art just sweeps you into its furious folds of angst and anxiety.
First-time director Bejoy Nambiar doesn’t waste time in introducing the characters. We know them almost instantaneously. And we never stop distrusting their instincts and priorities.Though they amuse, they also alarm us with their abuse of the luxuries provided.There’s a remarkable gallery of semi-pivotal characters who pin down the main drama with their dead-on impersonation of people you may or may not want to meet, but have run into somewhere or the other in this crazy bustle of contemporary existence that we call life.
A huge USP in many recent films set in the madness of the urban jungle is the raw energy of the outdoor locations.Shaitan assails you with the tension and the anxiety of people on the run. The camera is never inattentive.The street scenes and the sound-design are absolutely brilliant. Nambiar makes ample room on the soundtrack for incidental dialogues and sounds.And yet nothing that is said seems out of context.
With devilish dexterity we are taken into the homes, minds and fetishes of the five youngsters. In the first 25 minutes Nambiar constructs a cool case-study foy the young quintet’s self-destruction. Then he watches the trendy fund-flush world of designer labels and other costly indulgences come apart at the seams.
Some of the scenes are deliberately designed to exude the terror of over-indulgence. Fortunately most of the pay-off happens almost of its own volition.
Shaitan is a morality tale with a gut-wrenching twist. It dares to venture into the psychedelic world of the affluent urban young and then rips the veil of ecstasy apart to reveal the emptiness that defines every life lived on the edge of extravagance. Miraculously Shaitan is a morality-tale that doesn’t moralize. It creates a world of self-destructive pleasure pursuits but doesn’t sit judgement on that world.Nor does it gloat when that world comes apart.
Nambiar gets terrific support from his cinematographer(R Madhi) and editor(Sreekar Prasad) in creating a world that is cinematic and dramatic and yet real enough the shake us out of our conventional faith in what Pure Cinema should be. Comparing Nambiar’s style of storytelling to Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie or Nambiar’s mentor Mani Ratnam or Anurag Kashyap would be as self-defeating as comparing Shaitan to the other recent films on the young and the doomed.
Leave this one alone!Bejoy Nambiar creates his own world where the quirky and collapsible are constantly jostling for attention. The narrative is loose-limbed yet never flabby or self-indulgent. The film exudes the unbridled energy of a rock song but doesn’t forget to include a melodic underbelly in its compostional range. The madly idealistic cop(Rajeev Khandelwal)’s disintegrating marriage to a woman(Sheetal Menon) who just won’t talk(maybe because the others are doing so much of it) remarkably creates a space for itself in the stifling bustle of this film’s main action.
That Bejoy Nambiar is a master storyteller is established beyond a doubt in the film’s first few furious moments.He’s also an exceptional talent scout. All the newcomers semi-newcomers and the relative veterans join forces to create a pyramid of compelling performances whose sum-total is decidedly substantial. A special word for debutants Shiv Pandit, Gulshan Devaiya, and semi-newcomers, Neil Bhoopalam, Kalki Koechlin(her malice-in- blunderland act is haunting) and Raj Kumar Yadav(the Ragini MMS hero in top form here as corrupt cop).Also Pavan Malhotra as a senior police officer. As for Rajiv Khandelwal as a twisted cynical successor to Amitabh Bachchan’ angry cop from Zanjeer, this is a skilled actor with ample star-potential.
Shaitan is a work of many virtues about the myriad vices that plague the life of the young and the rich. It doesn’t preach. It doesn’t use Hindi abuse words for effect. And the camera chooses to focus on sagging moral values rather than heaving breasts .
The music blends into the volatile theme. There is a quaint re-mix of the Dev Anand-Mohd Rafi-S.D.Burman classic Khoya khoya chand as an ironical homage to the independence that the past generation fought for, and got.Today those ideals that seemed to define India’s hard-earned democracy have come to nought.Shaitan looks at the sub-zero level of moral values among a section of the urban young with a whimsical zest for a new kind of cinematic voice that is far removed from films about cops and desperadoes that we’ve come to know over the years.This is a defining moment in Indian cinema.Don’t f..k with it.
Delhi Belly(2011): The energy and the profanity spill out of this new-age film on male-bonding. Leaving behind the borderline coyness of Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai,director Abhinay Deo(who last made the staid and sedate Game) does a screen version of a full-frontal.No holds –or holes—barred.
Welcome to the land of the sacrilegous.The world of Delhi Belly is a womb of gangsters and bowel movements.Roars of country-made guns and the rumble of upset stomachs mix in an irreverent but tangy synthesis of the parodic and the profane.
This is as good a place as any to mention Ram Sampat’s music which is cheeky,over-the-top and unpredictable. Just like the picture-show.This farce-on-speed takes a perverse delight in showering abusive language on audiences who obviously haven’t heard such a torrent of profanities even in the fishmarket.Teri bahen ki….
Meet the foul-mouthed characters of this unabashedly irreverent flick about the seedier side of Delhi where,we are to believe, packages containing smuggled diamonds get accidentally exchanged with a stool samples. Blame it on half-sleepy flat mates who zipzap through the roads like zombies on heat.This unsavoury barter obviously creates some kind of a stink.Look before you poop.
The film’s central characters are three assholes(excuse the language)who can’t seem to speak a line without abusing mothers,sisters, wives,and other female members that are often attacked by…er, male members.Horniness and corniness are the cornerstones of this succinctly-written romp-raunch where bodily functions acquire a life of their own.
Independent of the profane lingo ,the film has a sharp spiky feel to its storytelling. You can’t miss the bite. The acerbic humour circumvents the goings-on in a swirl of devilishly-written sequences that leave us aghast with their cheeky disregard for cinematic conventions.
Writer Akshat Varma pulls out all stops to give Delhi Belly the texture of a tightly-wound s*x comedy. The gags and episodic humour are so brazen they often leave us speechless with embarrassment .Sample this: to escape being caught out by a jealous ex-husband debutante Poorna Jagannathan clambers on top of Imran Khan in panting glory.When she gets off we clearly see a bump in front of his trousers which is NOT a gun.
There we have it. The first mainstream hero displaying an aroused tool.Trust Aamir Khan to push the envelope…into places where protection doesn’t help.
Guns meet guffaws in this film that re-defines the parameters of permissible profanity without causing any deep-rooted damage to the moral fibre of our cinema or society.
While most of the adrenaline-pumping humour emanates from Akshat Verma’s writing the film,one suspects, would not have worked without the impeccable casting. Every actor is just correct for the film. But Kunal Roy Kapoor,Vir Das and Vijay Raaz score higher by a few points.Maybe they got out of the wrong side of the bed faster than the others.
Imran Khan makes a deft transition from poster-boy to potty-boy. He fits in comfortably with the writer’s smutty scheme of things.
The film makes us wince with its bowel jokes and toilet titters. But the characters seem so relaxed doing the sleazy stuff we just can’t help falling in love with their innocent luridness.
Shot in congested lanes of Old Delhi the film almost makes us smell the sweat mingling with the oil as hungry masses dig into unhygienic roadside food. Delhi Belly gives you instead belly cramps. And that’s not the food. It’s the laughter.A breathless ode to audacity and profanity Delhi Belly effortlessly jumps over all the pitfalls of its fiercely unorthodox storytelling and hits the roof with a whoop of irreverent joy.The sound of stomachs rumbling in protest and pelvises groaning in pleasure have never mingled so defiantly on screen before.Go for the kill.
