Jab Harry Met Sejal - Movie Review

CAST: Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma

DIRECTION: Imtiaz Ali

DURATION: 2 hours 24 minutes

If only Jab Harry Met Sejal had met the audience halfway. Or, perhaps an honest viewer before the Imtiaz Ali movie reached the screens. Because, this is a debacle there’s no recovering from.

The movie, which stars Anushka Sharma and Shah Rukh Khan, begins promisingly enough – filled with the promise of lush European countryside, great styling and panoramic shots – but plunges downhill far too quickly.

The premise? Sejal – who makes a cute show of telling Harry her name through rapid gesticulations of the hand – gets engaged to her boyfriend Rupen in Amsterdam while on a family holiday. Right before boarding the flight back to India, however, she discovers that she’s lost her engagement ring. A row with the fiance ensues and she stubbornly decides to stay back to look for the ring. Herself.

All well and good. Except – why doesn’t the fiancé care about the ring too? And why doesn’t he bother getting in touch for the next several days?

Sejal then enlists the help of Harry, a brash and rather brazen Punjabi tour guide, who has been at the Sejal family’s beck and call for the duration of the tour. Harry agrees to help her find the ring – only so she wouldn’t complain to his superiors – and thus begins a journey that you know can only end in a love story.

So far so good. The movie is dotted with loud but lacklustre songs which you forget the minute they’ve stopped playing – a far cry from the smashing soundtracks of movies like Tamasha and Rockstar. You’ll be happy to know, however, that the other backbone of an Imtiaz Ali movie – the travel – holds supreme in this one.

Harry and Sejal give you an ample view of Amsterdam, then Prague, Budapest, Lisbon, and Frankfurt – as they retrace the steps Sejal may have travelled with her fiancé after the ring was placed on her finger. Somewhere in the midst of all that travelling and scurrying around, the very Punjabi Harry and the very Gujarati Sejal fall in love.

Now, here’s where the beauty of an Imtiaz Ali movie shines through, because the love stories he scripts (ala Rockstar, Jab We Met, Highway…) are almost entirely seamless, floating effervescently above the mundanities of our daily lives.

But sadly, this is where the light at the end of the tunnel goes out. The movie goes through certain inanities as Sejal assures Harry he needn’t feel ‘looonely’ whilst she’s around and he can consider her his girlfriend. Er, what-why-who?

To cut a long story short, the ring is finally ‘found’ (let’s just say it was never really lost) and Harry and Sejal, in the process, discover vulnerable facets of their lives. Sejal prepares to go back while still in love with Harry and Harry makes no attempt to stop her, whilst still in love with her.

It is somewhere around this juncture that you are still desperately waiting for a miracle – hoping for an ace up the sleeve, a rabbit in the hat just waiting to be pulled out. Surely Imtiaz Ali has one? Unfortunately, such is not the case – and Jab Harry Met Sejal ends with a whimper and not a bang.

The performances look good, and Anushka Sharma is particularly believable as the self-assured engaged woman who speaks with a strong Gujju accent, knowing what she wants and going for it. Shah Rukh has finally been given an out-and-out romantic character to play, and he plays up the romance with elan. The performances are not enough to salvage a vapid movie, though.

Go for this one if you’re an ardent fan of either the director or the two main leads – I’m still recuperating and hoping to revive with a better film from their stables.

My Rating: 1/5

Shubh Mangal Saavdhan - Trailer Review

The Jodi which mesmerized the audience with Dum Laga Ke Haisha in 2015, is back in action! Ayushmann Khurrana and Bhumi Pednekar are coming back together for Shubh Mangal Saavdhan. The film is said to be a quirky rom-com.

The makers have finally released the much-awaited trailer of the film and I must say it’s just beyond amazing!

The crackling chemistry between the lead pair in the trailer is too adorable too handle. The best part of the trailer is the comic sequences. Handling such a sensitive topic of Impotency with so much sensibility and ease is just commendable.

From the punch lines to the dialogues everything keeps you hooked till the end of the trailer. We hope the movie gains some brilliant reviews. This will be the second time Bhumi and Ayushmann after working together in the National Award winning film Dum Laga Ke Haisha. Shubh Magal Saavdhan is the Hindi remake of the 2013 Tamil film Kalyana Samayal Saadham. The original film starring Prasanna and Lekha Washington, Kalyana Samayal Saadham was about a big fat south Indian wedding with a quirky twist.

This movie is being produced by the maker of blockbuster Tanu Weds Manu Aanand L Rai along with Eros. It has been shot in picturesque locations of Delhi and Haridwar. Even their last release together Dum Laga Ke Haisha was also filmed at these location

In less than a month, fans will get to see not one but two films of Pednekar. First will be the Akshay Kumar-starrer Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, which will be released on 11 August, followed by Shubh Mangal Saavdhan that hits the theatres on 1st September.

Indu Sarkar - Movie Review

CAST: Kirti Kulhari, Tota Roy Chowdhury, Anupam Kher, Neil Nitin Mukesh

DIRECTION: Madhur Bhandarkar

DURATION: 2 hours 19 minutes

Indu Sarkar is Madhur Bhandarkar’s cleverly titled film on the 1975-77 period when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi got President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to declare a state of Emergency across the country, allowing her, in effect, to be a Constitutional dictator. It is one of the most dismal phases in India’s post-Independence history, marked by the imprisonment of all Indira’s political opponents, a clamp-down on free speech and the press, and several human rights violations including, most famously, a programme of forced mass sterilisation of men across age groups.

With the Emergency in the foreground, Bhandarkar brings to us the story of the titular protagonist (played by Kirti Kulhari), an orphan in Delhi who has spent her entire life trying to overcome a congenital stammer. Teenaged and surname less, Indu wants nothing more than to be a good wife to some man someday. On the eve of the Emergency, she meets a Bengali named Navin Sarkar (Totaroy Chaudhary), a government official whose star is rising due to his known proximity to a prominent Congress politician. Indu and Navin marry, and she lives out an opinion less existence as his servile spouse until one day during the Emergency, she happens to venture into Turkman Gate area in Delhi, where the police are engaged in a street battle with residents opposing the bulldozing of their houses by the sarkar (government).

Indu is fictional but the police firing on civilians during the Turkman Gate slum demolition is very much a part of recorded history. Our heroine’s life changes forever when she brings home two children whose parents go missing in the melee that day.

There is rich irony in the fact that some Muslims believe Turkman Gate exemplified Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi’s “anti-Muslim agenda” (read “Turkman Gate relives Emergency horror”, The Times of India, June 2015, and John Dayal and Ajoy Bose’s book For Reasons of State: Delhi Under the Emergency, excerpted on The Wire in June 2015). The irony comes from the fact that Congress has always positioned itself as a secular party, and is currently at loggerheads with the ruling BJP, which makes no bones about its majoritarian, anti-minority agenda.

Bhandarkar — a committed admirer of the BJP — is clearly conscious of the parallels, which should explain why he completely excludes Sanjay’s wife Maneka Gandhi from Indu Sarkar. No doubt, portraying Maneka in the film would have been most inconvenient, considering that she was reportedly constantly by Sanjay’s side through the Emergency, yet she is a Union Minister in the present BJP government and her son Feroz Varun Gandhi is also a BJP member.

If Bhandarkar had had the courage to reference Maneka in his film, he could have made a cutting statement on how, at least in the context of the Emergency, Congress and BJP are two sides of the same coin. He does not. Instead, he chooses to appease the present establishment, erasing Maneka from the Emergency and showing Sanjay throughout the film in the company of other known figures from that period: prototypes of his real-life shadows Rukhsana Sultana, VC Shukla and Jagdish Tytler among others. (Sanjay, oddly enough, is named “Chief” and not Sanjay here, Sultana’s surname is only mentioned in passing, the others are not named but each is styled to resemble the person they are obviously based on.)

The writer-director’s lack of academic objectivity is his film’s Achilles heel. Still, Indu Sarkar is interesting in certain ways. The leading lady, for one, is a telling metaphor for the voiceless who find their voice when faced with extreme injustice. The talented and underrated Kulhari, who was brilliant in last year’s Pink, lends relatable sensitivity to Indu. Neil Nitin Mukesh manages to extract something out of his role, even though Sanjay Gandhi is written here with no nuance and no graph whatsoever. Mukesh’s styling as Sanjay is remarkable. Seeing him on screen is almost like seeing the late politician’s doppelganger.

With the benefit of a better-developed part, Totaroy Chaudhary is notable as Indu’s authoritarian husband, as is Satyajeet Sharma playing the Minister Om Nath.

These positives, however, are overshadowed by Indu Sarkar’s political iffiness and often shallow writing. For one, apart from Indu, Navin and Om Nath, the rest are all cardboard cut-outs and hangers-on. In choosing to downplay the other Indu, namely Indira (and by that I mean not just her fleeting appearance in Indu Sarkar but also in what appears to be her limited role in the goings on), Bhandarkar unwittingly lays almost the entire blame for Emergency atrocities on Sanjay. The character played by Anupam Kher, leader of a group of non-violent, anti-Emergency activists, is clearly an allusion to Jayaprakash Narayan — in Indu Sarkar the great man is reduced to a one-line concept.

In failing to rein in his biases, the director has missed an opportunity with Indu Sarkar. The Case of the Missing Maneka is one of many questionable choices he makes here. By casually setting the film’s first mass sterilisation scene in a largely Muslim area, he appears to be wordlessly pandering to the prevailing “Hum paanch, hamare pachchees (We five, our 25)” prejudice against the Muslim community in the country.

Bhandarkar, who once made that lovely Chandni Bar (2001) with Tabu, has delivered a qualitative downslide post-Fashion in 2008. His Heroine (2012) was steeped in clichés, and 2015’s Calendar Girls was both crass and regressive. To be fair, Indu Sarkar’s writing (story and screenplay by Anil Pandey and Bhandarkar, dialogues by Sanjay Chhel) is more mature than those last two films. We are certainly spared his by-now-predictable template (such as satellite scenes in which household help and others from less advantaged economic classes discuss their bosses, a stereotypical gay supporting character, etc), which is a huge relief.

However, better does not mean good. While Indu Sarkar’s narrative is more engaging than Bhandarkar’s recent works, it is still inadequate.

At one point, an important character in Indu Sarkar reminds a lawyer that she is anti-government, not anti-national, “deshdrohi nahin, sarkar virodhi.” It is a comment perfectly suited to the Emergency, while also mirroring present-day India where anyone who questions the ruling party, the prime minister or the government is labelled “anti-national” by their supporters, and where several commentators have spoken of the country being in a state of undeclared Emergency. Imagine how beautifully that statement could have been used to remind us that humanity repeats the mistakes of the past because we ignore our history. For that to happen though, Indu Sarkar required writing of greater depth and analysis, with less political selectiveness. As things stand, it is a matter-of-fact narration of certain events, with very little layering, elevated by good acting. We know the Emergency happened. Can you provide us with insights that go beyond mere facts? And if you cannot, what is point?

To say that Indu Sarkar is better than Heroine and Calendar Girls is hardly a compliment to the man who made Chandni Bar and Page 3.

My Rating: 2/5