Banaras: A Mystic Love Story
In director Pankuj Parashar's Banaras: A Mystic Love Story, this week's new Bollywood release, bright Brahmin girl Urmila Matondkar falls for music professor of low caste Ashmit Patel, causing much havoc in temple town.
Her parents Raj Babbar and Dimple Kapadia are not terribly excited with the match, but agree to get the two of them married when they learn that the boy may not actually have dodgy roots after all. But even before the sound of wedding bells can resonate, the groom-to-be is mysteriously killed.
Even as Urmila grapples to deal with her loss and turns to spirituality for answers, she discovers that her parents were never really going to let this wedding take place, and that they'd been secretly urging her fiancé to call off the wedding himself.
Hurt and betrayed, but also suddenly blessed with the power to read people's minds, Urmila abandons her parents and her home and moves to Mauritius where she continues to live as a spiritual healer. Navigating through this film, and decoding this script actually, is the sort of challenge that they pose to contestants participating in those million-dollar prize money game shows.
Banaras seems deliberately designed to confuse rather than engage. It's a film that compels you to ask many, many questions, but offers very few answers in return. It's esoteric in parts, and plain indecipherable in others. On one level it's the story of this young woman whose entire life, her love, her destiny is inexplicably linked to this temple town.
On yet another level, the film is a character study of this mystical town itself, where spirits pose as wise sages, and women with heaving bosoms celebrate the festival of colours with song and dance. Now, I'm willing to accept that all cinema can't provide the same kind of entertainment. I'm even willing to buy the argument that all cinema isn't necessarily aimed at providing entertainment.
But cinema must communicate, it has to tell a story. The problem here is that even after watching all 2 hours 40 minutes of Banaras, you're still not entirely sure what the makers want to say. Banaras is often so indulgent that it immediately alienates the audience. As the protagonist whose spiritual journey this film is about, Urmila Matondkar is surprisingly restrained, but Ashmit Patel - who made that guy an actor?
Director Pankuj Parashar who's made such entertainers as Jalwa and Chalbaaz in the past, fails to engage you this time round. If there's anything at all in this film that deserves special mention it's Nirav Shah's remarkable cinematography which lends both depth and character to this flawed story.
Rating: 1 / 5 (Poor)
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Shaadi Se Pehle
Also checked into the cinemas this week, director Satish Kaushik's Shaadi Se Pehle. In this film, Akshaye Khanna plays a young man who mistakenly believes that he's dying of cancer. He knows this news will leave his fiancee Ayesha Takia quite shattered so he decides not to reveal the truth to her.
He figures that the only way she'll come away unhurt is if she dumps him herself. But why would she dump him? Well, if he pretended to be an alcoholic and a womaniser, she certainly would. So that's exactly what he does. Akshaye pretends he's suddenly developed the hots for sizzling model Mallika Sherawat, and exactly as per plan, his fiancee sees red.
Now the only problem is that Mallika really falls for him, and it's not so easy getting out of that situation, because her brother Sunil Shetty happens to be an underworld don. Of course, eventually, Akshaye finds out he doesn't have cancer and he's not about to die.
But by now, his fiancee is in the arms of his childhood rival Aftab Shivdasani, and he's got an underworld don gunning for him. Making jokes about a disability or a serious illness isn't really funny. Unless of course you're film is a black comedy, which Shaadi Se Pehle is clearly not.
Shaadi Se Pehle tries to be a laugh-out loud, ha-ha comedy aimed at the frontbenchers. And so it's really not cool to go on and on about cancer and death. There's just so many times that you can make a joke about these things. The portions that are meant to be funny are so juvenile that you're reminded of the jokes you cracked way back in school.
The dialogues in the film are so embarrassingly childish that when you do actually laugh, you're not laughing with them, you're laughing at them. You know the thing about funny dialogues is that you need to space them out and you need to retain only a few really good, memorable ones. In this film, every other dialogue is a PJ or comes with a punch. As a result, it gets really very tiring because half the lines aren't even funny.
As you may have guessed already, the problem with Shaadi Se Pehle is its script. Writer Sanjay Chel's plot is as limp as a noodle, and his screenplay is as flat as a papad. The film starts off trying to spoof the comedy genre and laughs at itself, but remember, that only works when the writing is clever. Look at how the Hollywood comedy Scary Movie spoofs the slasher film genre.
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It's fantastic because it's written so well. Shaadi Se Pehle is such a badly written film that it's hardly in any position to mock the genre. Even Mallika Sherawat's character is designed as a spoof on herself, just look at her lines - "Hot, hot, forget me not" or "I can teach the whole country how to kiss" or then, as she comes out of a swimming pool in a bikini, she tells Akshaye Khanna "I'm dressed a little formally today because it's our first meeting.
Normally I would dress more casually." You know these scenes don't even raise an eyebrow, let alone raise your spirits. I have to confess that I've never been a fan of Satish Kaushik's movies. I found his social dramas Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain and Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai very loud and very regressive. I thought Badhai Ho Badhai was just plain stupid.
Vaada was completely predictable and Tere Naam was too melodramatic. So I didn't exactly go into Shaadi Se Pehle with any great expectations. But what do you say about a director who extracts a bad performance out of Akshaye Khanna? Because Akshaye Khanna in my opinion, is one of the most talented actors today.
But in Shaadi Se Pehle, Akshaye Khanna is so bad that you cannot believe this is the same guy who delivered such natural performances in Border, Dil Chahta Hai and Hungama. And somebody please tell Akshaye Khanna that we really like his balding look, why does he need to wear that silly wig with the fringe in all his movies now?
Ayesha Takia has precious little to do, and that's a pity because she's such a spontaneous actress. As for Mallika Sherawat, it's a role that suits her to the T, but really where's all that potential we saw in Murder? Also I'm going to make a special mention of Rajpal Yadav here who is so annoying in this film that you want to lock him up for good. Gone is his perfect comic timing and what we're left with is a screaming shouting, hysterical fool.
Somewhere in the second half of the film, I dozed off for about 15 minutes, and when I woke up again, I noticed that nothing much had really happened while I was knocked out. Shaadi Se Pehle goes on and on and on without any concern for your patience. I'm willing to sponsor director Satish Kaushik and writer Sanjay Chel on a holiday to a breezy hill station where they can get some fresh air and clear their heads. Because Shaadi Se Pehle is like a bad dream, it's the best way to punish an enemy, in fact it's the perfect punishment for the writer and director themselves. Just tie them to the seats and make them watch three shows of their own film back to back.
Rating: 1 / 5 (Poor)
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