Movie Review: Dedh Ishqiya

Release date: 10th Jan 2014
Director: Abhishek Chaubey
Rating: 4/5

It's unfortunate that the Saifai controversy has taken some sheen off the release of this brilliant work of art. For apart from the moral faux pas allegedly committed by the stars, there is little else to find fault with.

A review for a sequel (or a quasi stage for a sequel with the 1.5) would merit one to compare it to its predecessor. I remember the first one was a lovely entertainer in totality. Yet, apart from a dialogue or few, I have little recollection of the finer nuances of the movie - which is saying something considering just last night I was able to guess a rather old song from its first few notes and sing along, and it goes thus, "Chudi mazaa na degi... kangan mazaa na dega".

I must assure you that Dedh Ishqiya aapko zaroor mazaa degi. Betahasha mazaa. The mellifluous Urdu delivered by none other than the finest actors of our age Naseeruddin Shah have to rub off on its audience. It would help to know that the movie is extremely heavy on its Hindi and Urdu. But people who don't have Hindi as their mother tongue need not worry. We, the native Hindi speakers don't get a lot of it either. Hence, the filmmakers have been gracious to provide english subtitles. Distracting at times, but useful at most others.

Ok, so where do we start. The performances are exquisite. Everybody from the loud-mouth ruffian Arshad Warsi, the rather grey Huma Qureshi to the lanky, wannabe 'Nawab' Vijay Raaz delivers a very convincing performance. And then we come to good ol' Madhuri. Literally. There is no doubt age has started to show on her - the botox isn't helping, neither is the loud makeup. Yet grace does not wear away with age.

And this role was handcrafted for her. There are small dance sequences where you realize no other leading lady in Bollyland could have pulled this off. There are moments of romance between the aged Naseer and ageing Madhuri when there is no physicality, no words, hardly any music, yet the passion and longing is so intense, it makes your heart cringe.

The visuals are astute - the kind which make even cramped streets, ransacked dungeons and trash piles look wonderfully aesthetic. The dialogues are almost entirely in verse. There is so much in there for the die-hard romantics. Pick-up lines that you could only dream of coming up with. Exhortations of love that ricochet off your mind, your heart, your guts and well out from the eyes. And a special mention to those fine moments when Madhuri endearingly calls out Naseer by his name, almost killing him with fulfilment. "Iftekhar!", she utters. And you, in the audience, are swooning and wishing you were called that.

Well, I hope there are further instalments to this. I hope the Dedh is an indication of the Do to come. I hope our two vagabonds are back with another muse.

The Wolf of Wall Street: the Ad Hominem fallacy

I saw the Wolf of Wall Street this weekend. No surprises there. I believe almost everyone who is one or has kids whose coming years could be scarred by the sequences in the movie did.

Firstly, the movie release in India was delayed - something that has become less frequent of late. Then, I did not get the opportunity to watch the movie on Friday night itself. Evidently, by the time I set foot in the movie hall, my expectations were as tall as Deepika Padukone's legs. A tinge of disappointment was hard to avoid even though I found it to be a very fine work, rife with flamboyance, and delivered in rather astute fashion.

However, there was little about it that blew your mind, in my view. Interestingly, if one were to tell me to comment on a expectations vs. delivery chart, I found a lot of similarities in the output of the movie in question, and another much-awaited series bit from 'Sherlock' which came out almost at the same time as well. Both the pieces were carved out to deliver a spectacle, prove that the creators are not just unafraid of deviating from the usual but take great pains to do that, all the while paying little heed to the narrative.

They are part of the ilk of things wherein if you don't like them, it is assumed that you could not understand the profundity of what the creator was trying to convey. It's always like, "Did you see the the incline of the shadow of the third leaf in the fourth tree in the last scene? What, no? Well, it was in the direction of the 4 o'clock hand in a clock which is precisely when some obscure freedom movement zillions of years ago started! Gosh, how exhilarating!"

Ok, seriously, for those of you who have read the likes of Shakespeare in school/college or, in a context more related to this post, saw the 'intellectually loaded' movies, have you not ever felt that a lot of interpretations of movie visuals, sounds, camera angles, merely a concoction of vastly idle (albeit creative) minds in the audience? Just because these people were great thinkers implies every work of theirs will have layers of meanings that the aam aadmis will then take years to unravel.

Take for instance this review of WoWS, in no less a publication than the New Yorker. Now this guy has this pretty convincing opinion on how Scorsese played a masterstroke in the last scene of the movie by showing the blank faces of the audience, in the process letting the movie audience see a reflection of themselves in awe of the filthy rich, sleazy druggy Mr. Belfort. A rather haunting observation. I have no reasons to say this was not the case. But what if all Mr.Scorsese said was, "Oye chote, camera angle peeche leja. Fufaji ke bacchon ko screen pe dikhna hai."

Well, I am sure Farah Khan showed scenes of the audience watching 'Om Shanti Om' in sequences of the movie 'Om Shanti Om'. I am sure there were people in there going 'Dafuq just happened!'. No one ever said, "See, the audience is being presented a reflection of themselves".

The same with Sherlock, and innumerable other texts, poems, movies in the recent, long back and ancient history. All these writers (and I respect a whole bunch of them for their exquisite words) have at times received undue credit just because someone reading their verses, hundreds of years after they were written, took his creativity a step further, eked out some outlandish derivative of the author's words and exclaimed, "So ahead of his time, bro. So very ahead."

In this category, my favourite is that guy who wrote this beaten to death story titled, "The Lady or the Tiger". That lazy ass thought up this ingenious scheme of free-riding and leaving the conclusion to the reader. More than a century later, poor Indian kids are wondering why the tiger did not gulp up the author himself.

There are times when I believe that a all a lot of people in the world need to is relax. Not make too much of things, because well some things just happen, some people just say stuff or write stuff just because.

Sit back. Enjoy. Get up and, like always, go back to work tomorrow. At times, life and all that there is to it is rather ordinary. And that is perfectly OK!