Page03.com - Bollywood News

Two of ‘hero’ Tusshar Kapoor’s sidekicks look at each other and say, “Nowadays, only Yash (Chopra) uncle has successes.” No truer words are spoken in this bogus love triangle that goes from corn to corniest with no break to feel the ache caused by every tepid take.

There’s something immensely graceless in a film about a loser who befriends and courts with pursed lips and tight jaws, signifying that strange and outdated concept known as “silent love”.

In comparison, the other man (played by agreeable newcomer Karan Hukku) comes across smelling like roses. He reminds you of all those lonely eligible bachelor-tycoon types from Vinod Khanna in “Chandni” to Himanshu Malik in “Tum Bin”. The spunky lass Kajal (played by the spunky Ayesha) loves the loser who has a permanent hangdog expression, as though he has just come out of a terrible illness and is in desperate need of sympathy.

Sympathy is what the makers of this anaemic love story need for attempting a tale like this.

Material for a tele-film is turned into a baggy feature bogged down by cardboard characters and sidekicks who chase everything in skirts and bikinis.

The South African beaches offer the director a chance to focus his creaky vision on butts and bosoms. Alas, voluptuous female forms cannot compensate for a lack of vigour and contours.

The script (by Rahul Singh) is what a love-struck adolescent would write for a school competition. It portrays the characters as a bunch of nerds best left in the pages of a pavement pulp novel for girls between the ages of 9 and 12.

Last week, we saw a superbly knitted script in “Life Mein Kabhi Kabhee”. This week we see a film in search of a script.

The editing by Steven Bernard alternates courtship scenes between Kapoor and Takia with comic relief. But what relief do we obtain from the tedium of watching a feature film that mistakes cinema for the home medium?

The performances leave you cold and shivery, waiting for one moment to connect with the characters. That moment never comes.

A word of advice. Watch Kareena Kapoor’s sizzling item song at home and stay away from this dead-at-the-centre love triangle about a boy who deserves no love, a girl who deserves more love, a suitor who deserves no-more love and an audience that deserves the cinema that it gets

Vikram Bhatt’s best-scripted work to date is about the dreams and ambitions of the very young, and not so young.

Dreams die hard in “Life Mein Kabhie Kabhiee” (LMKK). As they fall with a thud to the ground, Vikram Bhatt, displaying a sensitivity seldom on evidence in his films, catches the tears and laughter and splashes them in this film about five friends and their scattered shattered dreams.

The film moves into various strands. Manoj Tyagi’s screenplay weaves in and out these warm lived-in lives with a dextrous flourish.

Like many of Bhatt’s works LMKK is suffused with characters. Miraculously they all seem to have a life even when Pravin Bhatt’s camera isn’t looking. Bhatt gives each of the five protagonists a reverberant existence that takes them beyond the stylised sets and clichéd locations, (does a film on the young have to have happy songs on the beach and the pub?) sometimes straight into our hearts, sometimes a little higher.

Even a seemingly minor sequence tends to take the narrative above the routine. Watch the sequence in the mall where Raj Zutsi’s first wife runs into his new play thing. “I can see from the shopping bags how happy you are,” says the first wife to the second.

Girish Dhamija’s outstanding dialogues reveal the continuity of the state of mind known as unhappiness.

Every character hurls towards his or her imagined happiness. But is finally looking into a yawning inertia echoing what Milan Kundera described as the unbearable lightness of being.

There’s Rajeev (Dino Morea), who breaks away from his strait-laced entrepreneur-brother (Mohnish Behl) to pave his own tortuous path to success. Mona (Nauheed Cyrusi) takes the easy route to stardom - the casting couch with a caddish leading man (Rajat Bedi), while the loving supportive boyfriend (Annnuj Swahney, as dependable as a character as he’s as an actor) languishes at home.

Then there’s Ishita (Anjori Alagh) who marries money (Raj Zutsi) only to look straight into the eyes of desolation.

And yes, there is Jai (Sammir Dattani) the troubled, tormented guilt-stricken politician trying to find his way out of the dark deep tunnel of self-recrimination.

Shivdasani doing his cute eye-rolling wide-eyed goofy-grin act, is the one who holds the laughter in place in this aromatic ode to the scowl of life.

The plot seems outwardly a mass of unmanageable ideas. Thanks to some deftly-written scenes dotted with dialogues that make you sit up and listen, this segmented, sighing, sobbing giggling chirrup of chain reactions comes together with a sun ‘n’ shade virtuosity.

Yes, technically the film needed a hand-up. Often the project’s modest undertaking clearly shows up in the sets. Also Pravin Bhatt’s cinematography is unable to create an even uni-view into the lives and loves of the characters.

Barring a few performers (Sammir’s psychiatrist is a laugh, and so is Dino’s love-interest), the quality of acting conceals the technical leaps. From the tried and tested Raj Zutsi and Mohnish Behl to their contemporary counterparts like Dino Morea and Aftab Shivdasani, everyone gets into the skin of things. Newcomer Anjori Alagh has a complex gold-digger’s part. She is able. On the other hand Nauheed Cyrusi looks as lost on the casting couch as she does off it.

But it’s Sammir Dattani playing what could be interpreted as a modern-day version of Sunny Deol in Rahul Rawail’s “Arjun” blossoms into an intense and watch-able actor.

This should’ve been Sammir’s debut film. But even if it isn’t, that’s okay. At last he got here.

That’s what “Life Mein…” tells us. Don’t create a labyrinth of regrets in your life. Live in the moment. But don’t fritter away the echoes of eternity that carry human aspirations from here to eternity

The best part of Guddu Dhanoa’s delayed eruption of exacerbated violence is the Sultan Khan-Zubin Garg music video played with the end titles.

But by then it’s too late.

Assorted villains appear in various stages of this cut-n-paste bone-crusher. They represent various phases in the narrative’s gasping, wheezing existence. They also try to cover up for the film’s outdated pre-”Lage Raho Munna Bhai” thesis of social justice.

Sunny Deol still throws a mind-boggling punch. This is a film where Sunny’s legendary punches go a lot deeper. Goons, who throw acid on hapless girls’ faces, are buried alive in the sand with one punch.

Wanna one-way ticket to dhoom-filled doon? Check out the rapes, murders, lynching and looting in “Big Brother”, you could fall over your chair just hearing the hyper-strung insistent and cacophonic soundtrack that qualifies the constant search for brute force.

The film has two seamless halves done as an ode to the spirit of the vigilante. The hero, ironically named Gandhi, believes in a high for a high and an uncouth for an uncouth.

The narrative is plastered with reporters pressing microphones into our hero’s face until he doesn’t know where to look. Certainly, not the mirror where Sunny would have seen two looks that the plot has given him - one with a dishevelled wig and the other with a more manageable hairpiece.

In both cases Sunny towers over the proceedings. Surprisingly, the second-most important character is mama Farida Jalal, whose one stern twitch drives Sunny boy into a wild orgy of revenge.

Priyanka, though hardly there, wears her middle class saris and coy glances with surprising aplomb and a look of respectful detachment. She has been better photographed here than in all her other recent films.

Among the villains Sayaji Shinde has the best lines. And he uses his cheesy character to butter up the dry script, giving us a kind of running commentary on the trite conventions of Hindi cinema, mocking them while using them to carry the creaking saga forward.

The noise level and the constant harping on violent means to get even with anti-socials makes you wonder which is worse - the malaise or the cure. Either way, “Big Brother” is only recommended for those who are die-hard fans of the Guddu Dhanoa-Sunny Deol pair.

The less said about the clamorous bhangra and other item songs, the better

In Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors”, the battered wife Paula keeps justifying her bruises by saying she as a habit walks into closed doors and hurts herself.

The battered wife Kiranjit Ahluwalia in Jagmohan Mundhra’s jolting exposé on domestic values never gets a chance to walk in or out of that closed London door where she lives with her brutal husband. She chooses her husband’s death over her own exit.

It’s amazing how the true-life Kiranjit found freedom by setting her abusive husband on fire. In one of the film’s most sensitively delineated dialogues, Kiranjit says to her rather overly benign prison-mates, “I’ve never felt freer in my life.”

What sort of trauma would it take for a woman to feel free in prison?

“Provoked” answers the complicated question of domestic disharmony with a deft and direct approach to the question of a woman’s place in the man’s ’scream’ of things.

The intermittent flashbacks showing Kiranjit’s spousal nightmare, cut deep and hard into the narrative. Full credit to Aishwarya Rai for plunging deep into a part that she plays from her heart.

True, at times she looks too pretty to be ravaged. But the vulnerable, fragile, little-girl-lost quality in her personality works to great advantage in portraying the spouse-burning victim as a woman scorned beyond endurance.

There’re moments in the narrative where Aishwarya melts your heart like an ice-cream cone left out in the sun for too long.

Madhu Ambat’s cinematography is so sweeping in its specificity that it creates a spatial bond between the protagonist’s heart and her hostile-to-compassionate surroundings.

Mundhra and Sanjay Mirajkar have edited the harsh material with extreme economy of expression. The film moves mercilessly forward leaving no room for a breather.

Among the unforgettable sequences, count the one where the stern lady constable asks Kiranjit to take off her jewellery and clothes. Kiranjit pleads in hushed anguish, “Never take clothes off in front of husband.”

Aishwarya’s inherent inhibitions give the character a mocking edge. How could this tender woman set her husband on fire? Imagine the levels of torture she must have suffered!

Blessedly, we are shown only fragments of Kiranjit’s trauma. Director Mundhra makes sure they are enough scenes to make us wince without making our stomachs churn.

Cleverly but tenderly formatted as a thriller-in-flashback, “Provoked” opens with the burning figure of Deepak Ahluwalia (Naveen Andrews) running screaming out of his house. Mundhra moves smoothly backwards into events leading to this gruesome incident.

Female bonding has always been a favourite theme in Mundhra’s films - remember Shabana Azmi and Deepti Naval in “Kamla? In “Provoked” the bond that develops between Kiranjit and her cellmate Veronica, played by Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter Miranda Richardson with supreme cheer, is remarkably well tuned to the sisters’-solidarity theme that forms the narrative’s backbone.

Nandita Das is also in fine form as a spunky ’sister’ activist holding up a torch for the torched husband’s tortured wife. Every actor in the smallest role gets it right and bright.

Naveen Andrews’s despicable brutality as the husband makes your skin crawl, as it’s meant to.

But the film clearly belongs to Aishwarya. She gets a grip on her character Kiranjit’s predicament with a fluid grace, her large eyes brimming over with untold grief as she pleads with her lawyers, “Please let me see my children.”