Anupama Chopra's review: Agent Vinod

By Hindustan Times

Direction: Sriram Raghavan
Actors: Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor
Rating: **1/2 stars (Out of 5)

There is enough to admire in Agent Vinod. Writer-director Sriram Raghavan’s globe-trotting tale of a RAW agent ticks off all the boxes for a thriller franchise: There are at least half a dozen exotic locations (we start in a place aptly named the Desert of Death in Afghanistan and touch down in various locales including Morocco, Moscow, Riga and Somalia), several femme fatales, elaborate action, an assortment of villains and a suitcase bomb that sets the events in motion.

At the centre of this whirlwind is the agent himself — stylish, sardonic and smart — a man without the baggage of Jason Bourne or the swagger of the pre-Daniel Craig James Bond. Agent Vinod, played nicely by Saif Ali Khan, is a home-grown hero. Cool and efficient, he maintains his dry wit even in difficult times — so when his partner the Pakistani operative Iram Parveen Bilal, played by Kareena Kapoor, is weeping as they drive through Karachi because she’s returned home after 15 years, he curtly says: Yaadon ki Baraat ko disturb karne ke liye sorry.

Raghavan is a masala movie buff, and one of the hidden pleasures of watching his films is playing Spot the Reference. Here, he doffs his hat to several Bollywood hits, including the original Agent Vinod (incredibly, gang members here also maintain scorpion tattoos, like in the Mahendra Sandhu film), the original Don, Baazigar, Amar Akbar Anthony and, for good measure, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. He also has a sly sense of humour and a robust talent that comes through in some sequences like the treatment of the song Raabta, which is absolute genius.

But when I walk into a film called Agent Vinod, what I want, more than anything else, is an adrenalin rush. The breathlessness that kicks in when you’re watching Ethan Hunt hang off the Burj Khalifa building in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol or the staggering hyper-realistic chase sequences in any of the Bourne movies or gritty action of the new Bond films. Agent Vinod doesn’t deliver on that. This is a frantically busy movie. There are so many locations, characters and twists that you are guaranteed to get confused and yet, you also get restless because the movement doesn’t build a sense of urgency. The plot plods along, especially in the first half.

Agent Vinod is also attempting to be too many things — a slick thriller to match Hollywood but also a cheeky homage to cheesy Bollywood movies. So the film has gloss and fast-paced action but the villains are a throwback to the 1980s — after all, how seriously can you take Gulshan Grover in a white suit or Prem Chopra with a ponytail or Shahbaz Khan with one glass eye?

The result is that Agent Vinod never becomes more than the sum of its parts and even though it picks up speed in the second half, it leaves you both exhausted and unsatisfied. But I enjoyed the character of Agent Vinod. If he does get a sequel, I hope he has a better narrative to romp in.

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Anupama Chopra's review: Chaurahen

By Hindustan Times

Direction: Rajshree Ojha
Actors: Victor Banerjee, Arundhati Nag, Soha Ali Khan
Rating: **

An English film with a smattering of Hindi, Bengali and Malayalam, Chaurahen is based on four short stories by acclaimed Hindi litterateur Nirmal Verma and is set in Mumbai, Kolkata and Kochi. Each story is built around a writer and deals with characters struggling to come to terms with death and loss. I haven’t read the original stories but something was obviously lost in translation. Chaurahen is a stilted, dramatically inert film that even at approximately 90 minutes feels much too long.

Aisha, Rajshree Ojha’s reworking of Jane Austen’s Emma, was released first, but Chaurahen is the director’s debut film. It lay in the cans for almost five years before PVR’s Director’s Rare banner, a great initiative to bring independent cinema to theatres, picked it up.

Chaurahen has good intentions but erratic execution and few insights. Ojha has gathered some wonderful actors here -- from Victor Banerjee, who plays an aging man in an adulterous relationship with a girl young enough to be his daughter, to Arundhati Nag and Nedumudi Venu, who play grieving parents who have lost their son in war. But then, these actors are saddled with dialogue that strains to be poignant and piercingly deep. So in one bed, a couple has the following discussion: “Games, it keeps things balanced.” “What things?” “Games of relationships, love, power.” While in another bed across the country, the post-coital conversation goes like this: “What is the closest you have ever come to dying?” “One dies a little every day.”

There is death in each story but the only one with genuine emotion is the Kochi episode. Ojha handles tricky scenes well, including one in which the protagonist, played by Karthik Kumar, reveals a difficult secret. Nag, Venu and Kumar imbue their grief with a quiet grace. Their anguish is palpable.

But Ojha’s good work here is undone by the Mumbai saga, in which Ankur Khanna plays a writer holding on to his dead parents – and by that I mean literally. He still keeps his father’s dentures in the house, for instance. The writer and his partner, played by Soha Ali Khan, wander around Mumbai saying things like “Happiness does not exist. It is only remembered in times of agony” and “D minor is the saddest of all chords.” Kiera Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter, makes a largely forgettable appearance in the Kolkata chapter as an object of desire. Zeenat Aman also drops in, playing a mysterious woman at a bar. I’m sure there is a sub-text here but it eluded me.

Chaurahen brims with tortured souls, pensive silences, meaningful looks and meals left unfinished. Not surprisingly, it’s a slog of a film.

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Anupama Chopra's review: Kahaani

By Hindustan Times
Direction: Sujoy Ghosh
Actors: Vidya Balan, Parambrata Chattopadhyay
Rating: ***1/2
Kahaani is a nifty thriller with an enjoyment quotient that is indirectly proportionate to how long you spend thinking about the plot. If you back-track and try to connect all the dots, the implausibility of the story amplifies - there's even a piecing-together-the-puzzle moment that echoes The Usual Suspects but this riddle isn't a patch on the intricate web of lies in the Bryan Singer film. However, if you're willing to think less, there is some fun to be had here.
Kahaani is the story of Vidya Bagchi, a software programmer from London played by Vidya Balan, who is both heavily pregnant and missing a husband. She arrives in Kolkata and heads straight to the police station from the airport - a fact remarked upon by the cab driver who is intrigued and bemused by her. So are the cops. Vidya insists on staying at a seedy guesthouse, which proudly advertises running hot water because the employees include a young boy who runs to the rooms with a kettle of hot water. Vidya is helped in her quest by an earnest cop Rana, played by Parambrata Chattopadhyay. But her husband seems to have disappeared into thin air - there are no school records, no relatives, no immigration records for Arnab Bagchi.
Director Sujoy Ghosh, who has co-written the story with Advaita Kala, keeps the tension tight and the volte-faces, frequent. Early in the film, Rana tells Vidya that everyone in Kolkata has two names, which here literally translates into two separate identities. So no one is what he claims to be. I especially enjoyed the unveiling of a dumpy-looking insurance agent. Ghosh cleverly uses Vidya's pregnancy - every time she trips or even sweats too hard, you become afraid - and the city of Kolkata to engage us in his story. All the tourist attractions from Victoria Memorial to Howrah Bridge to Durga Puja are duly ticked off. But this is the first time the city seems dangerous and ominously frenzied - so much that even getting a cab at the airport is fraught with strain.
Kahaani loses some steam post-interval. The tonal inconsistencies become more glaring and beyond a point, I lost track of the many intelligence agents, cops, moles, informers and double agents. It's also hard to marry the gritty telling with a slightly cartoonish plot hinging on a terrorist attack and poisonous gas - the first scene which has a man in a mask testing a killer gas on rats made me flashback to Sachiin Joshi's ridiculous thriller Azaan, in which a character grimly declares: India is under attack. Khatra biological hai!
But thankfully Kahaani doesn't come unhinged. The first-rate performances help steer it to shore - from Vidya Balan to Parambrata Chattopadhyay to Nawazuddin Siddiqui who plays a hard-nosed IB agent and Saswata Chatterjee who plays the insurance agent. Balan, quite effortlessly, manages to be both vulnerable and resilient. So despite the loopholes, Kahaani fulfills what it sets out to do and keeps you hooked and guessing. Which in itself is no small accomplishment.
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Anupama Chopra's review: Paan Singh Tomar

By Hindustan Times

Movie: Paan Singh Tomar
Direction: Tigmanshu Dhulia
Actors: Irrfan, Mahie Gill
Rating: ***

There is an understated elegance about Irrfan (he dropped the last name Khan some time ago) in Paan Singh Tomar. He plays a national level athlete who becomes a dreaded dacoit in the Chambal Valley. Tomar sprints over hurdles with breathtaking ease and eventually displays the same stubborn determination while murdering men who have robbed him of his ancestral land. Irrfan imbues Tomar with grace and a quiet dignity. So even when he meets the inevitable fate of a bandit and his body riddled with bullets, collapses into the dusty ground, there is something heroic about him.

Paan Singh Tomar is fiction inspired by true events. The story is remarkable –Tomar is an army subedaar who gets into athletics only because sportsmen get more to eat. After a race, the first thing he does is grab and devour a bunch of bananas. Tomar keeps his faith in the system and doesn’t resort to violence until a lethargic, blatantly corrupt cop refuses to register his complaint and instead asks Tomar, who has travelled abroad for sporting competitions, why foreigners wear such few clothes. Hurt and angry, Tomar wonders: Desh keliye faltu bhagey kya?

The moment has genuine pathos. As does Tomar’s wounded declaration to a journalist that despite being a seven-time National Games winner, he remained anonymous, while murder and kidnapping brought him fame. But despite the rich raw material and quality performances, Paan Singh Tomar doesn’t soar. Stretches of the screenplay are sluggish and strangely inert. More critically, I never got a sense of what Tomar’s conversion from an army man to a murderer did to his psyche. Yes, he resorts to violence only because he is provoked but subsequently, he seems oddly at ease with his criminality. Director Tigmanshu Dhulia establishes a loving relationship between Tomar and his wife, Indra, played by Mahie Gill. But Indra and his two children largely disappear from his life when he becomes an outlaw and we never really see him ache for them.

Dhulia was a casting director on Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen. In interviews, he has said that he first heard about Paan Singh Tomar while working on that film and decided that some day he would make a film on him. Tomar was a confrère of Phoolan Devi. Naturally then, we see some of the same motifs – the spidery curves of the ravines that seem to swallow up the dacoits, their habit of announcing their presence on loudspeakers, a massacre that leads to a police clampdown. But Paan Singh Tomar doesn’t sock you in the gut like Bandit Queen did, partly because none of the supporting characters have enough flesh on them. The villains are especially non-descript, nasty but not menacing.

Paan Singh Tomar has good intentions but not enough emotional heft. I wanted to feel more. But what Dhulia and Irrfan do give us is a fascinating character who was at once, complex and childlike. He makes it worth watching.

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Anupama Chopra's review: London Paris New York

By Hindustan Times

Direction: Anu Menon
Actors: Ali Zafar, Aditi Rao Hydari
Rating: ** 1/2

Towards the end of London Paris New York, there is a moment of unvarnished truth. Nikhil Chopra, a fledgling film director played by Ali Zafar, rails against the woman he loves – Lalitha Krishnan played by Aditi Rao Hydari. Among other things, he calls her a tease (preceded by a word that cannot be reproduced in a family newspaper). He wipes away tears and spews hurt and hate. It’s a tough scene but Zafar doesn’t falter. His rage rings true.

I wish the rest of London Paris New York were as well pitched. Written and directed by debutante Anu Menon, the film follows the crisscrossing paths of Nikhil and Lalitha over eight years. They meet, for one night only, in three different cities. What begins as a hesitant friendship evolves into passion and eventually a more mature love. The story echoes One Day, the Lone Scherfig film based on a best-selling novel, in which the man and woman meet on July 15 over twenty years.

Nikhil and Lalitha aren’t very different from Dexter and Emma in that film. Like Dexter, Nikhil is rich and somewhat spoilt and aimless. Like Emma, Lalitha is middle class and focused. But Lalitha, who stridently proclaims that she is a feminist and does work with an NGO, is slightly more annoying.

When an entire film is based on the meeting and parting of two individuals (who are thereby in every frame), it puts enormous pressure on the actors and writer. Both need to sparkle consistently. Even first-rate performers find it a tough act. One Day, which stars the Oscar-nominated Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, is a big bore. I admire producers Goldie Behl and ShrishtiArya for eschewing the star route and casting fresh faces; the choice of Hydari, who till now has been relegated to supporting roles, is particularly brave.

But then the leads are made to fit into that over-familiar glam styling and foreign locations. In the Paris segment, Hydari struts around in mini-skirts, boots and an intriguingly bad wig. The look of course reflects her state of mind but it feels false. Hydari has a luminous presence – even as the bua in Delhi-6, she made an impact. But here she seems to be working too hard to get the right mix of fluttering eyelashes, steeliness and vulnerability. Meanwhile Zafar relies too much on The Smolder – that smugly sexy look that the robber Flynn Rider gives Rapunzel in the Disney film Tangled.

The actors are also bogged down by the writing, which ranges from inspired (the climactic outburst mentioned above) to insipid. Too often, Menon resorts to formulaic character traits, so if Nikhil is a pretentious film school student, he must have a goatee and refer to Andrei Tarkovsky. London Paris New York has sufficiently seductive visuals of all three cities. In Paris, Lalitha, wearing only a sheet, has breakfast on a balcony with the Eiffel Tower looming large. It’s postcard perfect but also a little plastic. As is the film.

Starting today, Anupama Chopra becomes Hindustan Times’ film critic. Chopra has written on the Hindi film industry since 1993. Her work has been published in India Today, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Variety and Sight & Sound. She presented and scripted a weekly film review show, Picture This, on NDTV 24/7. She is the author of four successful books on cinema, including the internationally acclaimed Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema, and Sholay: the Making of a Classic, which won a National Award.

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