Shanghai - Movie Reviews ( Note: Pg 17) - Page 47

One expected more!

By Beth Watkins

I could write a month's worth of columns on the films of Dibakar Banerjee, the director of last weekend's big release "Shanghai." In his time, he's directed the clever, quiet comedy "Khosla Ka Ghosla" (2006); a portrait of a complicated crook, "Oye Lucky Lucky Oye" (2008), starring Abhay Deol, who also features in "Shanghai"; and "Love Sex aur Dhoka" (2010) – a collection of biting, gut-wrenching stories.

In all of these films, Mr. Banerjee uses typical masala elements in unusual ways and to utterly different ends. This approach makes his work compelling, relatable and fresh.

Hindi cinema tends to disregard the pedestrian aspects of realism, but Mr. Banerjee likes to blur the real and the fictional. Even the mild-mannered family in "Khosla Ka Ghosla" creates a fictional world through which they can challenge their enemy.

In "Love Sex aur Dhoka," three segments of "found footage" have been captured by various modern technologies and then compiled into a deliciously tacky program called "Reality Cinema." But maybe the manipulative power of contemporary media, which Mr. Banerjee so powerfully skewers in the film, means that what you have just witnessed is so distorted that it cannot possibly be a reality you need to be concerned about.

Masala films condition us to assume that a very particular and predictable moral order will be upheld and restored, but Mr. Banerjee deftly toys with those expectations. In "Khosla Ka Ghosla," the sweetest and simplest of his films, he lets us have what we expect, but it comes at a cost, with the sympathetic characters committing fraud on a huge scale. They ultimately choose to work for a version of family unity that the patriarch desperately wants, but for its fulfillment they sacrifice other values like honesty and legal innocence. The sharp divide between right and wrong has disappeared and is replaced by murky shades of "less wrong."

The main character in "Oye Lucky Lucky Oye," is the pinnacle of a lovable, unethical anti-hero. Lucky lies, steals and cons. He's sassy, impetuous and selfish. Yet we still hate to see him thwarted, and it stings when he is disappointed. Even the local police won't treat him like the criminal they know him to be, instead joking with him and basking in his heroic glow. And in "Love Sex aur Dhoka," the moral order has decayed so much that almost nobody gets what they deserve. Romance is bludgeoned, a desperate request for closeness is laid bare, and a slime-ball's star just continues to rise.

We Bollywood-watchers know about irony—boy do we—but we don't often see it employed for the effects that Mr. Banerjee gets with his third film. The ironies in "Love Sex aur Dhoka" are lethal. The young lovers Shruti and Rahul follow the overly-worn path of dozens of romances, but instead of heading towards happily-ever-after they are literally torn apart. They try so hard to live up to both the grand concept of filmi love and the real-world demands of family and authority, but they are dealt the opposite of a Bollywood ending.

Many other common masala elements take new turns in Mr. Banerjee's films. The staple motive of revenge is humorous in one setting and enacted against the least deserving players in another, where a poor boy and rich girl are united by death instead of by a miraculous realization of the power of love. Familial love reunites one group but fails in another character's situation so severely that he is in essence completely alone in life. A corrupt, unfeeling power system is beaten at its own game by brave players who resort to exaggerated flaunting of laws and norms. A villainous buffoon (who is directly compared to famous bad guy Amrish Puri) gets his way despite showing not a shred of humanity. The long-suffering Maa is translated into a young heroine who witnesses a man shot in front of her eyes, learns of her best friend's ghastly murder and misguidedly seeks comfort in the arms of an exploitative lowlife.

One of Bollywood's best-loved romances, "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge," gets a special place in "Love Sex aur Dhoka." When Rahul and Shruti are swept away in their dreamy romance, narrating their love to that film's creator, Aditya Chopra, they make the fatal misstep of not waiting for her father's permission before marrying, even after he scolds Rahul that stories of elopements are damaging the culture.

Years ago at an art museum I saw a mechanical installation that, with a robotic arm, picked up a snapshot from a huge pile, held it out to you for inspection, and then ran it through a shredder, the pieces of the destroyed photographs falling in a pile. Mr. Banerjee's films remind me so much of that experience. "Here are elements you know," he seems to imply, before putting them in a blender. He ultimately gives them back, in a less recognizable but even more impressive form.

Beth Watkins has been blogging for more than five years at Beth Loves Bollywood. She is an expert on Bollywood history and lore as well as contemporary movies and actors (that's her on the left, with the Shah Rukh Khan action figure). You can follow Ms. Watkins on Twitter @bethlovesbolly.

Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.

Originally posted by: liverach

^ yesss, that slow motion scene was really something...

I was clueless though 😆 baad mein everything made sense