I’ve developed a policy for weekend movie-watching over the years:   Fridays and Saturdays, anything goes, but Sunday evenings, no depressing films allowed.    There’s nothing worse than going to sleep Sunday night after seeing Enemies: A Love Story or Pixote.  

Under this criteria, Chandni Bar should be seen no later than Friday night; it’s a terribly bleak, though honest,  portrayal.

Madhur Bhandarkar’s 2001 film opens with Mumtaz (Tabu) sitting at a train station in UP with  tears streaming down her cheeks, waiting for a train to Bombay.   It’s 1985 and she is  fleeing with her uncle from  communal violence in their small town that has just burned her parents to death and  killed many others.   Her fate  just goes downhill from there.

Tabu narrates at the beginning and end of the film, telling us, in the voice of Mumtaz, how circumstances brought her to dance in a beer bar, and the effect that those experiences had on her life.   She is perfect for this role, owing to a certain gravitas she has about her every time I’ve seen her onscreen.

Upon arriving in Bombay, the pair are lucky (depending on how you see it) to meet Iqbal (Rajpal Yadav), a fixer who lives in a poor Muslim neighborhood in Bombay and knows his way around.   He finds a small place where the two can live, and he soon suggests to the uncle that Mumtaz could make some fast money dancing as a bar girl.    Unworldly, small-town  girl that she is, Mumtaz is horrified at the idea, though her uncle takes to it without batting an eye, telling her it’s just so they can survive until he finds a job.   (Surprise, surprise, he doesn’t look that hard and quickly abandons his search altogether.)

At first, the girls are indifferent and/or snarky to Mumtaz, but eventually they warm to her and show her the ways, especially Deepa, whose husband drives an auto and is her pimp.   There’s one brief scene where the girls go for a day out in Bombay, and as they stop to eat snacks on the seafront, they tell her “This is where Shakti was filmed!”   After Mumtaz’s uncle rapes her one night, and she tells the girls at the bar, they hold her to soothe her, then they tell her to stop crying and all explain their own sad stories that they’ve endured.

The set for the  Chandni Bar itself  looks authentic, badly lit and scruffy around the edges (especially the girls’ waiting area/dressing room, complete with peeling movie star posters on the wall and a cracked window in the door, from where they peer out at the customers and other dancers).

Things seem to take a turn for the better when Mumtaz meets Pothia (played by the very excellent Atul Kulkarni), a criminal who falls in love with and marries her.   On their wedding night he learns that she was raped and sets off to find her uncle and avenge the crime.   In the years after, they have a daughter, Payal, and a son, Abhay.   Mumtaz is able to stop working at the bar and resolves that her children will have better lives, but, her dreams are upset when Pothia is killed on  the orders of his own mafia boss, in collusion with the police.

Mumtaz tries to recoup money from Pothia’s criminal partners, but they either  shun her or suggest she goes to Dubai and prostitute herself for a couple of years, so  she is forced to return to Chandni Bar, and juggle watching the children with dancing for the customers.   She’s keeps  her head above water for a few years, using all her strength to send the children to an English language school, when her son, then a teenager, is thrown in jail for something another kid has done, leading to a domino effect of tragic events that touches mother and children equally.   There is no happy ending in this film.   As Tabu narrates at the end in the voice of Mumtaz “I wanted to see my future in my children, but I saw only my past.”

To the director’s credit, the movie does not sensationalize the bar girls’ lives, and the supporting cast are flawless.

See it or skip it?

Skip it except if you’re a Tabu fan or jonesing for a serious, reality-based movie with no musical numbers.   For me, the relentless catalogue of one tragedy after another was too much, and the pace of the film is very slow.

O.k., let me come clean with you.      

I have a teeny, tiny crush on Ritesh Deshmukh.   It’s nothing serious, and I was thrilled to see him recently in as good a movie as Bluffmaster (especially given some of his other films, like Out of Control), but this   – ahem – minor affliction does cause me to sit through some movies I’d otherwise pass on.

Which is how I came to pick  Mr. ya Miss  off the shelf last week at the local rental place.   After  the disc loaded on  the player and the credits started to roll, I really wanted to like this movie, Ritesh aside.   I mean, it was made by a woman:  the screenplay is  by Antara Mali, she was also one of the directors and the lead actress, not something you see much in mainstream Hindi cinema, but oh dear, what a silly mess of a movie.

The story is basically a Bollywood version of Switch, written and directed by Blake Edwards, except in this case, instead  of Jimmy Smits as the womanizing boor dying and coming back as Ellen Barkin, it’s Aftab Shivdasani (ho hum) and Antara Mali.

Sanjay Patel (Aftab) is a caricature, wolf-whistling at women  (and I thought the maintenance guy in my building was the only one who still did that) and juggling multiple girlfriends at once, telling them all the same lines and lies, often while leaving his buddy, Shekar (Ritesh), forgotten and waiting for him.   After one sleazy move too many, he is confronted by three of his girls, and in a fit of pique one  of them, Lavleen,  clocks him on the back of the head with a statue and kills him.   Standing before Lord Shiva and Parvati, like the fast-talker he always has been, he begs them for mercy, and they resolve to send him back, as a woman, so that he can appreciate how truly great we really are, and not just for our bodies.

Sanjay is now Sanjana, the supposed half-sister, who  shows up at his workplace, and starts to see, with the idiot colleague, Verma,  who keeps dropping his pen so he can  peek under the girls’ skirts, what it’s like to be on the receiving end of his kind of behaviour.   Sanjana has to get outfitted in more gender-appropriate clothes than Sanjay’s pants and shirts, but I must  say, her choice of clothes, especially for someone so sensitive about adjusting to her new body, is confusing.   She appears in a variety of  low-cut shirts and short skirts and heels.  

And this is one place where the movie fails badly: Antara Mali’s interpretation of a man who’s come back as a woman trying to figure out how to walk (literally) in women’s shoes.   She goes way over the top, lurching about and grabbing onto furniture as if she were on a violently listing ship in a storm.   Not just that, she goes on like this     way     too     long.   This is one of the frustrations of Hindi movies for me, this taking a physical trait and overexaggerating it, hitting the moviegoers over the head with it repeatedly, like Rani Mukherjee’s Chaplinesque gait in Black.

Then there’s the  long hair.   Sanjana may be a big exec at a PR firm, but she can’t figure out how to work a chip clip and hold her hair back off her face.   Add to that the weird facial expressions (that bring to mind Silvio on The Sopranos), and it’s just awful.

So, Sanjana stumbles on, getting to be close pals with Shekar (who has no idea who he’s really with), and trying to reel in a big client at the firm, one who turns out to find her very attractive and goes to many lengths to get his hands on her.   And on and on.  

Shekar and Sanjana get really drunk one night and – guess what – end up in bed together, resulting in her getting pregnant.   This one plot point was actually a rather bold move, one that Blake Edwards didn’t dare touch in Switch.   I mean, a guy who sleeps with his best friend who is a guy trapped in the body of the girl, does that qualify as a homosexual experience?  

More confusion ensues when Sanjay’s dead body appears on a beach and Sanjana finds herself charged with the crime, thanks to Lavleen’s lying in the courtroom.   Do you relly care how it all turns out, as if you couldn’t guess?   I didn’t think so.

Interesting note: the use of the sari.   It appears only twice in the film.   First, Sanjana has to go to a party at the client’s house and wants to wear something to cover herself up, and the choice is a red sari, in which she does look lovely.   The second time is when the lying Lavleen (who normally wears short, short skirts and tight, tight blouses) wants to be perceived as a  demure,  credible  woman in the courtroom, she shows up in a pink sari in one scene and a yellow one in another, both times with blouses with Mandarin collars.

The only saving graces of this film, for me, are few.   There’s  the song Kamzin Kali, which shows Shekar and Sanjana in a variety of costumes and romantic poses.    It’s the only time in the whole movie that Antara Mali gets to look like a woman comfortable in her own skin (and with a small tatoo on her right shoulder), and Ritesh looks particularly fetching in a brown and turquoise striped shirt running on the beach.

And then there’s Ritesh, in all his Tweety Bird-lipped glory.   I found  some of his  outfits in Bluffmaster  too accesorized for my liking, but in this movie, the costume department gets him just right.   First, they have him in some genuinely attractive shirt and tie combinations.   Then, they have him sporting these gorgeous Cary Grant/YSL eyeglasses, which suit his face and frame his eyes just fine.   And then there’s the hair, not too short, not too poofy, and the most perfectly sculpted sideburns, not too wide, not too thin.

See it or skip it?

Skip it.   Bas.

While not a mainstream Hindi movie, I thought I’d include  a  review here that I did a few months back of Deepa Mehta’s most recent film.  

Water, the final film in director Deepa Mehta’s trilogy of the elements, proves to moviegoers that good things can come to those who wait.

The history of the making of the film is itself an epic saga. It took a total of seven years to bring the movie to screen. In 2000, just two days into filming in Varanasi, under the complaint that Mehta’s film was casting India and Hinduism in an unflattering light, violent protests, destruction of the sets and death threats by political and religious groups shut the production down. Four years later, after a patchwork of funding and a new cast were lined up, filming began again, this time in Sri Lanka, under an innocuous false title and tight secrecy. Mehta can consider herself vindicated, as the film was selected to open the Toronto International Film festival last September and has been garnering rave reviews since.

The movie opens with the main character, the eight-year-old girl, Chuyia, sitting in the back of a cart, chomping happily on sugar cane and being chastised for tickling the feet of the man stretched out next to her. We learn that the year is 1938, she is a child bride and her husband is dying. Uncomprehending and unperturbed, she sits blankly in the next scene while the now deceased man is cremated in Varanasi and her long, thick hair is shorn. Under the dark of night, her parents deposit her at a widows’ residence just off the banks of the Ganges, setting in motion a chain of events that leaves its mark on many lives, just as Gandhi’s influence at that time is having an effect across India.

When faced with the dire penury and restrictions the widows endure, the distraught child rebels. Some of the women are touched by her and take pity on her. Shakuntala (played by Seema Biswas, in the role that was to have been Shabana Azmi’s) is stern but kind, and she becomes a mother of sorts to Chuyia. Living upstairs, apart from the others, is Kalyani, played by the ethereal beauty, Lisa Ray, who has been allowed to keep her hair long because she is prostituted to wealthy clients across the river. She plays older sister to Chuyia, and her small garret serves as a refuge. The ashram is ruled by Madhumati – the physically imposing madam of the house (literally) – who can only see Kalyani as a unique revenue source. When she learns of Kalyani’s love for a young man, she does everything she can to thwart the union, first cutting off her hair, and then locking her up.

The love interest, Narayan, is played by John Abraham, who Mehta says she chose for his eyes and voice, and “because he could convey idealism and not be a wimp.” Narayan is a sensitive, thoughtful law graduate excited by the teachings of Gandhi. He questions everything that he cannot make sense of or accept: British rule in India, his mother’s wish that he marry soon just because of his age, and the treatment of widows. Narayan falls in love and is prepared to flaunt convention and his mother’s opposition to be with Kalyani, just as several threads of the story come together, with tragic results.

Of the three films in the trilogy, this is the strongest and most complete. While Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das (who is still not on speaking terms with Mehta) would likely have performed well, we are fortunate to witness Seema Biswas shine in a role that she has made her own.

On the occasion of Fox Searchlight Pictures release of Water in the U.S., Deepa Mehta was in New York for interviews, where she said the most challenging role to cast was Chuyia. She looked at 80 young girls in Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata, but found that “most have been so influenced by Bollywood and the soaps they have unconsciously imbibed mannerisms that are so over-the-top and I thought it would be real work to undo that.” Sarala, the young actor chosen, comes from a small town near Colombo. Speaking only Sinhala, she learned her lines and direction through translation and sign language.

Lisa Ray and John Abraham are unexpectedly solid in their roles. Also in New York to promote the film, Lisa Ray commented that, while she has no intention of pursuing work in Bollywood movies, working with Abraham was “a revelation” and that she would have to, on occasion, stifle a laugh while still on camera because her co-star would trip on his dhoti upon exiting the scene.

The dialogue in Water is pared down and not as speechy as in Fire and Earth. Mehta herself admits it was too lengthy in the original script.

The absence and appearance of color weave in and out through the film. The widows’ residence is grey and bleak, emphasized even more by the ghostly residents, semi-catatonic in their grubby white saris and shorn heads. A riotously bright parrot and black puppy, two creatures not bound by man’s use of religion, provide vivid contrast to the bloodless lives of the virtual shut-ins. Because our eyes become accustomed to the visual monotony of the household, the scene of the puppy Kaalu running through the Varanasi lanes, dashing by chickens and through dry red peppers, the brilliance of the clothes worn by a mother and young daughter giving alms at the temple, Chuyia’s Krishna costume and the colored powders as the widows celebrate Holi, all explode on the screen like a flash flood in a desert. Even Narayan asks Kalyani about her would-be new life: “What is the first color you will wear?”

When talking about being a Toronto resident for over 30 years and returning often to India to make the movies that she does, Mehta credits being an Indo-Canadian, saying that “In Canada we really are a multi-cultural society, there is no melting pot and that is why I never felt that I had to leave my Indianness behind.” At the same time as the movie’s release in the U.S., Newmarket Press has just published Shooting Water: A Memoir of Second Chances, Family and Filmmaking by Devyani Saltzman, Deepa Mehta’s daughter. The twenty-something Oxford grad narrates the deep impact that her parents’ divorce, and choice to live with her father, had on her parents and herself in the past 15 years, and how, working in India and Sri Lanka as a member of the Water crew, allowed her a chance to rebuild her ties with her mother.

First thing I noticed is that the name of the film’s jeweler is listed before the opening credits even start running.   Once the movie gets underway, you understand why: the women, and quite a few men, are dripping in more bling than you’d see at the BET awards.

The story in a nutshell: Rani Mukherji marries Shahrukh Khan in Ye Olde Rajasthan.   He’s a bean-counter by profession and, in spite of Rani’s charms, even as they are jolted about against each other in a carriage home from the wedding, he’s pouring over his accounting books, instead of checking out his fetching new wife.   They stop in a village to cool off for a bit and a ghost catches a glimpse of Rani and falls in love with her.   After an unconsummated wedding night, Mr. Accountant Khan sets off on a five-year business trip, leaving the Mrs. in tears.

The ghost gets wind of the fact that the object of his desire will be unchaperoned for a long time and takes on the guise of the husband, pretending to show up back home early.   The family is duped, as is Rani.   But just as the couple are finally about to get down to business, the ghost comes clean to Mrs. Mukherji about who he really is, and, get this, she’s so tickled by the lengths that he’d go to in order to be with her (and so ticked off at the hubby disappearing), she tells him to stay.   They settle in to a blissful existence together, SRK the Ghost works his charms on the village in a kind of Lagaan/Swadesi way, until (cue suspenseful music) the real husband returns, just as Rani’s in the throes of labour.   Toss in an appearance by the Big B as a Solomon-like goatherd in a dhoti (boy, does he have skinny calves), and some hocus pocus later, loose ends are tied up.   Fin.

The costumes are a magnificent array of strong jewel colors and gold embroidery that hold up well against the desert sun and endless blue sky.   The women are swathed in lots pf reds and pinks, ghunghats firmly pulled down whenever the menfolk are around.   Meanwhile the fellas, all turbans and twirly moustaches, sport blousy empire-waist shirts that tie at the side.

Two puppets serve as narrators and a Greek chorus  of sorts.   Naseeruddin Shah – here in  voice only – outperforms Suniel Shetty (who appears in the second half in a cameo role) in totum.

Shahrukh Khan is himself, energetic and playful, with eyebrows like two tildes escaped from a Galdós  novel.    Rani’s feline eyes are magnetic as she peers up, scene after scene, from under her veil.   Score one for women’s lib when she replies to a choice that Khan the Spirit has presented her with: “No one has ever asked me what I wanted.”   The two together are entirely credible as a manand a woman who can’t get enough of each other.

Juhi Chawla may well have a second career ahead of her as a woman of more substance than she was in her earlier roles.   Playing the abandoned sister-in-law, she has more gravitas and presence than before she passed the perkiness mantle on to Preity Zinta, and her face is more luminously beautiful, whereas before she was merely toothy and pretty.   It’s interesting to see her cast as a woman close to her own age, and to note that her place as leading lady beside Shahrukh Khan now taken by Rani Mukherji.   There was a lovely frame of her, alone as the other women go off to the temple, the stark contrast of the hues of her clothes set off by the small mounds of white cotton all around her.

(By the way, who else is going to change the spelling of their name?   Sunil was Sunil, but  now he’s Suniel.   Rani Mukherjee was Rani Mukherjee, ’til she became Rani Mukherji.)

The special effects – mainly Shahrukh  appearing and disappearing in a swirl of sand – are well done.   Similarly, a small cluster of flower petals floating before SRK’s eyes in one scene, and a circle of them darting around Rani’s footsteps in a courtyard  are believable.   The only thing that is obviously fake is the blue bird at the start of the movie, one of the ghost’s avatars, fluttering around and following Rani at the Rajasthani rest stop.

As with most Bollywood movies, a few things are not quite right.   Anupam Kher is cardboard thin as the money-grubbing father.   Juhi Chawla’s reaction to her husband’s reappearance after seven years is way  too muted, to say the least.   If the man you loved and had married vanished with neither trace nor explanation, and stayed away for almost a decade, wouldn’t you haul off and at least slap him a few times if he suddenly waltzed through the door?   One other question to ponder is, how can it be that an entire village accepts Rani’s infidelity (even if she was, as they believe, tricked), to say nothing of the same reax from the family she married into to?

But as a purely romantic fable where True  Love conquers all, the movie works.   The lovers never quarrel, SRK is always doting and affectionate, nobody says “Just once, will you please stop leaving you clothes on the floor!”   In a scenario reminiscent of Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos, when husband and ghost meet, the phantom Khan explains to his flesh-and-blood doppelganger: “I’m the love she longs for.”   Sigh.

See it or skip it?          

See it!   Beautiful to look at, with a different story.