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Shyam Benegal brought us the first satire this year – ‘Well Done Abba’. Here’s the second one – Peepli [Live]. Apart from the timeliness, there is one other similarity between the two – reference to those eligible for the Below Poverty Line (BPL) certificate. That’s where the comparison ends. While ‘Well Done Abba’ takes hold of one issue and forces open the Pandora’s Box on corruption in government offices, ‘Peepli [Live]‘ delves into complex issues with subtlety.

Peepli [Live] has a remarkable story but it ends with one line which endorses the director’s vision and brings out one of the most unnoticed and overlooked phenomenon in the country – the migration of villagers to cities in search of a better life.

The film reveals that 80 lakh farmers quit farming between 1991 and 2001  a grim statistic for a country whose economic well-being is based on agriculture. Director Anusha Rizvi zeroes in on the alarming fact that in India, farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain themselves through farming.

Pepli Live is the story of a struggling Farmer  Natha. He is on the verge of losing his land because he has not been able to repay the loan against it. The loan was taken for his mother’s medical treatment. As Natha (Omkar Das) and his brother Budhia (Raghubir Yadav) ponder how to save their ancestral land, a local neta suggests that they could commit suicide as the government usually compensates the deceased family. Natha decides to die and this is carried by a local newspaper.

The story is picked up by national TV channels and hurled into prime time news. What ensues is a battle between news channels to get the first piece of news. Live coverage of the issue rocks the political stage.

‘Peepli [Live]‘ cleverly and beautifully unearths the loopholes in government policies and the media slugfest which breaks out in the name of breaking news. The screenplay is beautifully done to fit authentic details. Despite being a first time director, Anusha Rizvi stays clear of any temptations to adding regular masala such as the ubiquitous item number. The director gets one more thumbs up for absolute detailing – right up to names on a carton of a TV set and bottles of packaged drinking water. There is meticulous attention to dialogues and cinematography. The camera works to add absolute authenticity to each frame.

What makes ‘Peepli [Live]‘ an absolute delight are the performances from the completely fresh cast. They bring life to rural India where they no longer remain in a frame of cinema, but transcend into reality.

A few references could be drawn to the Amitabh Bachchan film ‘Main Azaad Hoon’ which also dealt with a suicide which became an event.

The only drawback – the slightly slow pace of the first half and the ending – which is akin to real life – leaves you wanting for justice to the grand build up.

Peepli Live is a Class Act and it will be another mile Stone by Aamir Khan director. The Film is showed real life of  a farmer.

Prachi Desai Prevention Magazine July 2010. Prachi Desai features on the cover of Prevention Magazine for the month of July 2010. Prachi shares her beauty secrets. Prachi Desai will be seen in action with her upcoming multi-starer Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai in which she shot a classic pose which was done by Dimple Kapadia in her first movie Bobby. Checkout Prachi Desai Prevention Magazine.

Since the time of the announcement of Mani Ratnam’s Raavan, curiosity about how India’s most accomplished filmmaker manages to do a modern day adaptation of the mythological epic, Ramayan, has known no bounds. Thankfully, Mani succeeds in his own inimitable way. His team’s painstaking hard work shows in every frame of the film and his actors help him raise the film’s bar.

The film opens with policemen killed at various places around Lal Maati, a small town in Northern India. This is followed by abduction of the local police chief Dev’s (Vikram) wife Raagini (Aishwarya Rai). The dreaded low cast tribal lord Beera (Abhishek) is behind the kidnapping. Dev (Vikram) immediately gets hot on the trail of Beera with trusted lieutenant Hemant (Nikhil Dwivedi) and seeks the help of the jovial forest guard Sanjeevani (Govinda). Beera knows the dense jungle like the back of his hand and is helped by the tribals, managing to stay just one step ahead of Dev and his team. But as the cat and mouse chase proceeds between Beera and Dev, the initial hate of Raagini for Beera subsides. As Dev inches closer, the near maniacal Beera shows he has a heart too and Raagini almost loses hers to him. What follows after Beera and Dev come face to face forms the rest of the film.

Taking on a mega epic like Ramayan and turning it on its head giving his own personal interpretation, Mani Ratnam dares to depart from the religious text and succeeds in showcasing how Ram can be a Raavan and how a Raavan can also be a Ram. Aided by the best technical crew of Indian cinema, Mani has made his multilayered film, a technical marvel to watch with awe. The first half moves on rapidly mostly focusing on Dev’s chase of Beera, but however it gets boring beyond a point since the story hardly moves ahead. Mani also fails to establish the exact setting of the outlaws. Are they Naxals or a modern day Robin hood gang? But it is the beginning of the second half where Mani begins to pack his solid punches and achieves the peak with an unusual climax. Beera’s background (the reason for Raagini’s abduction), Dev’s impatience to grab Beera, Raagini’s gradual change of perception about Beera and eventually the final face off between Dev and Beera have all been terrifically captured.

Abhishek is nothing short of brilliant, portraying Beera. If you thought Abhishek delivered his best under Mani in Yuva and Guru, watch Raavan for his evolvement into an actor of true caliber. Aishwarya Rai delivers a top notch act. Makeup less and forever battered and bruised, Aishwarya’s eyes convey a lot more than the shrieking her character has to resort to most of the time. Vikram unfortunately is saddled with a one dimensional character for most part of the film until the climactic punch. He looks fearless and arouses enough curiosity as an actor to watch him play Beera in the Tamil version of the film. Govinda as Sanjeevani brings on the much required comic relief in the tense proceedings and succeeds. Ravi Kissen grabs the opportunity to impress with both his hands and does well. Priyamani playing Beera’s sister, in her brief role manages to bring out the pathos of her unfortunate character. (more…)

Too many strings attached to this “Kites” that never soars to the heights it should and becomes a predictable tale of star-crossed lovers set in the glittering lights of Las Vegas and the brooding deserts of Mexico. It’s “Matchpoint”, “Bonny and Clyde” and much else rolled into one, failing to take off on its own.

The problem with “Kites” is that it is never truly its own film. The first half constantly takes you back to Woody Allen’s compelling “Matchpoint” with the doomed quartet of Jai (Hrithik), his girlfriend Gina (Kangana Ranaut), her brother Tony (Nick Brown) and his fiancée Natasha (Barbara).

Life is set to roll for the rakish, down and out Jai with Gina, the fabulously rich, hopelessly in love daughter of a Vegas casino owner, until he meets Natasha, the exotic Mexican immigrant also looking out for the good life. The attraction is inevitable – and fatal.

The pull is irresistible. Designer watches, flashy cars and jewels beckon but Jai and Natasha are caught in a relationship that transcends language. She knows no English and he knows no Spanish.

So far so good, before the script decides to meander into a “Bonny and Clyde” caper with the couple on the run from the powerful Tony robbing a bank. Completely unnecessary and giving no time for the intensity of the romance to develop.

The narrative moves back and forth in time, beginning with a bloodied Jai tumbling out of a train wagon and stumbling across the desertscape to look for his ladylove.

So you get a sense of what is in store. The predictability of the script is not really a problem – the opening line of the film lays the tenor, with Jai in a voiceover telling you that two kites flying together can never soar very high or very long because one has to get cut.

This is a chronicle of a tragedy foretold, much in the way of other epic romances. Dare I say Romeo Juliet!

It could have worked. The much talked about chemistry between the lead couple is in evidence, but not enough. Director Anurag Basu is at his best in the intimate scenes.

Like when Jai looks out of his window to see Natasha being roughed up by Tony and goes to comfort her. There are no words but the shadow play on the wall of their fingers intertwining is romance as it should be.

The soul of true love is there somewhere, but it gets lost in the two-hour film that also brings in murder, torture and gunmen galore. Basu seems lost in the larger macro frame of the film.

The two main characters are not fleshed out enough, and the others around them are like caricatures. How many Bobs (Kabir Bedi as the powerful, ruthless casino owner who does not balk at shooting down cheaters) have we seen, or Tonys, the archetypal jealous boyfriend with an army of goons behind him?

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There’s a longish sequence in an American eatery in the second-half of this deeply flawed and yet refreshingly cool urbane casual and yet highly cinematic work where Shahid Kapoor’s Karan, by now on the road to seemingly irredeemable moral degeneration is told by his partner, played by newcomer Vir Das, that he wants out.

The way that sequence progresses and the manner in which the two actors play out a conventional friends-falling-apart moment, just makes you forgive all the excesses of inflated self-worth that the script suffers from in the last 90 minutes of this endearing though exasperating experience.

“Badmaash Company” is a film that is too smart for its own good. The main characters, four friends bonded by the collective will to grow rich overnight, go through a series on caper experiences. Not all of it is either convincing or even interesting. After a point, we know exactly where this quartet is hurling to. And the slide out of moral degeneration is never touching enough to make us shed a tear for these misguided over-reachers.

The doom comes none too soon, and then the narrative proceeds without a proper graph. By the time Karan (Shahid Kapoor)’s spunky girl Bulbul (Anushka Sharma) leaves him the script begins to look like one of those subverted morality tales from the house of the Bhatts where the heroes talk with clenched fists and heroines weep in their pillows as their companions come home in a drunken stupor.

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This is a sly tongue firmly and stubbornly in cheek, slick and chic comedy about a loser, or a panauti – a word that recurs ad nauseum in this glorious gasbag of giggles, winks, nudges and innuendos packaged with such polished panache that you don’t really care what the inter-relations in the parodic plot finally signify.

Maybe they signify nothing more than a numbing but pleasantly diverting nothingness. But who the heck cares, as long as the tumble of confusions generates a hilarious havoc.

“Housefull”, as the title suggests, is chockful of characters who bump into one another and into hard surfaces (including the unresolved edges in the plot) without injury. It’s all done in ricocheting rhythms of laughter that rises from the pit of the plot’s belly and moves upwards towards us, sometimes missing its target.

More than the screenplay (Milap Zaveri, Sajid Khan, Vibha Singh) which moves helter-skelter in every direction away from the centre of the plot and just about succeeds in coming to a reasonably coherent conclusion, it is the bevy of characters who are positioned in the screenplay with a supreme sense of pyramidal aptness.

Every actor shines because he or she knows the idea is to have fun and to transmit that fun to the audience. It’s the actors’ responsibility to make the maze of inter-relations hold together. They succeed.

Yes, sometimes the actors seem to enjoy the comedy of energetic error more than we do. Beyond a point how many slap-happy slipping-on-the-floor nudge-nudge-wink-wink oops-we-did-it-again rolling of the eyes biting-of-the-tongue jokes can we take?? (more…)