Bollywood Inquiry July 2019: SUPER 30 & JUDGEMENTALL HAI KYA

Bollywood Inquiry is a monthly column on the biggest new Bollywood movies. Disclaimer: I may not have seen all of the past month’s globally released features.

Super 30 (Vikas Bahl)

Super 30 only has one objective and that’s to inspire. It’s a biopic on Anand Kumar, the founder of the Super 30 initiative, an educational program that selects 30 talented students each year from economically underprivileged sections of Indian society and trains them to get into the Indian Institutes of Technology. It’s well-intentioned and well-made but highly dubious.

The poor and illiterate state of Bihar has many kids like Anand Kumar, gifted and talented but with no access to suitable educational resources. The modern world’s capitalist economy tells us money is everything, resulting in wealth inequality around the world with India having one of the biggest income gaps. The prodigal young Anand survives by riding on his bike to go around selling poppadoms on the street. Obviously there aren’t enough poppadoms to sell in a day so he spends the rest of his time developing his mathematical abilities, which pays off when he subsequently becomes a tutor.

Before the tutoring route, Anand is admitted into Cambridge but his father’s death and a lack of financial support from the morally bankrupt education minister prevents him from taking the opportunity, and inadvertently sets him on a collision course with the money-hungry powers that be. The film posits that, by accident, Anand bumped into Lallan Singh, the CEO of an educational institute, Excellence Coaching, who knew of his genius and offered him a place to teach. It happens so perfectly cinematically – he crashes his bike into Singh’s car – that it undercuts the film’s credibility.

Even prior to this scene, there are heightened moments of convenience and coincidence: Anand’s father collapses on a stormy night, and Anand attempts to hitch him on the back of his bike to the hospital but his chain collapses along the way, ultimately causing Rajendra Kumar to succumb to heart failure whilst Anand looks to the sky and scream.

Maybe the details of these moments aren’t so important because, as aforementioned, the film’s purpose is to simply inspire. Therefore, as long as the filmmakers cover the sequence of the events that led him to forming the educational program, which has been hailed by Obama’s special envoy as “the best institute in India”, then the truth can be attuned for the highest entertainment value. But my perspective is that these choices undermine the man’s real achievement by mawkishly embellishing his narrative, thus detrimenting the enjoyment factor.

As I had this thought , I still didn’t manage to  prepare myself for the worst to come. Super 30 is a super long film, running close to three hours, so it has a super lengthy finale and it’s super ludicrous. We understand all these students who we’ve come to know in Anand’s classroom: they’re smart, fast, outside-the-box thinkers, we understand that they’ve come from poor backgrounds and here’s a place where they can be treated without class prejudice and unlock their potential. Anand Kumar’s mission is to provide what couldn’t be provided to him. I couldn’t really tell you any more about how he achieved his goal because, honestly, there aren’t any particularly unique or unorthodox methods of teaching shown here but the point is really that he provided the basic means.

Towards the end, the situation between Anand and an increasingly envious Lallan Singh preposterously devolves into a shootout (I can’t find any results on Google to determine the reality of such an event) and our protagonist is then rendered into a Professor X type. His students outwit a whole gang of armed enemies with their minds, citing that they didn’t just learn maths but a whole way of life, a sort of “wax on, wax off” philosophy. Anand Kumar is never presented as some sort of Mr Miyagi despite the climax’s attempt to paint him in such a way.

Not letting facts get in the way of enlivening a story, Hrithik Roshan delivers the goods with a grounded, sympathetic performance but his use of bronze-face to portray his darker-skinned counterpart is distracting. Under some lights, Roshan looks like one of those badly tanned reality TV stars. Under other lights, the bronzing looks invisible, particularly against the sunny sepia-imbued backdrop of Bihar. But, under all lights, it’s an unacceptable choice for an actor in this day and age. I understand the commercial viewpoint of needing a superstar to get a film financed and widely distributed but the colorist subtext is problematic.

Bihar is vividly captured as director Bahl handsomely mounts his movie, using the camera to inform his lead actor’s performance foremostly, holding shots at length when he’s capturing Roshan in his element as the vivacious teacher, appreciably cutting only after the moment is truly over. Highlights include a motivational speech scene (it’s hard to go wrong with those, really) and when Anand discovers his students’ fate after the final exam – a million words are spoken in the medium close-up of Roshan’s slow, silent, subdued control of tears and ecstasy.

Mrunal Thakur, as love interest Ritu Rashmi, is a revelation. She doesn’t get much screen time – relative to the length – but makes a splashy impression in her scenes. There’s a point where Ritu smiles through the pain whilst crying her eyes out during a break-up with Anand and it’s perhaps the most powerful bit of acting in the movie. I wish I had such strong emotions watching Super 30, a competently filmed entertainment but a frustrating embroidery of a story already inherent with cinematic value.

Judgementall Hai Kya (Prakash Kovelamudi)

transl. Are You Judgemental?

I’ve been waiting for this peculiar movie for a long time. Judgementall Hai Kya has been a magnet for controversy, particularly surrounding its lead actress Kangana Ranaut.

In short: the name changed (from Mental Hai Kya) after the Indian Psychiatric Society considered the original title to be derogatory to mentally ill people; release delays (from March to May to July) and the lock for July 26 was interpreted as a taunt at her ex-beau Hrithik Roshan, whose Super 30 was initially scheduled for that date, leading him to issue a public statement about avoiding the media circus of a simultaneous release; a media boycott after a skirmish between Ranaut and a journalist, and the resulting Twitter spats involving her sister Rangoli Chandel.

Despite all that, it was impossible not to be excited for a movie featuring two immense talents and previewed with a cracking trailer. Thankfully, the anticipation paid off. Prakash Kovelamudi’s darkly comic thriller is so crazily enjoyable because it’s so enjoyably crazy.

We follow voice-over artist and live-in landlady Bobby Grewal (Kangana Ranaut) play a pulsating game of cat-and-mouse – or rather cat-and-cat – with her new tenant Keshav (Rajkummar Rao), a pesticide company employee with a strong poise. His cool demeanor makes Bobby suspicious and uncomfortable, the stoicism contrasting with her unhingedness, which has landed her in the mental asylum a few times. Keshav is in a relationship with Reema (Amyra Dastur), whose naivety halts her from digging deeper into the cosmic skepticism generated between her partner and Bobby. This exacerbates with Reema’s fiery death.

One night, a scarred and charred Reema is wheeled out of the home on a stretcher, propulsing Bobby to find out the truth behind what she believes is a case of murder. Of course, her sole suspect is Keshav. There’s little narrative thrust behind Reema’s death – her hamstrung characterisation is a result of screenwriter Kanika Dhillon preferring to focus on the two-hander but forced to create emotional stakes in the form of a dead relative. It would’ve still been an intriguing story without Reema because Bobby and Keshav are perfectly positioned as insoluble opposites.

They’re a pair obsessed with each other, neurotic about each other’s presence and intentions, but that’s only explicitly gathered from one of them. In this dynamic, Bobby is the outwardly maladjusted one whilst Keshav is an illusory entity of the Patrick Bateman kind. They confront each other afterhours by the fuse box as Keshav plays with electricity. In one of many cracking exchanges, Bobby asks why he’s carrying a knife and torch in the middle of the night to which he responds, “Why are YOU carrying a knife and torch in the middle of the night?”

I’m reminded of Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, one of the great films of recent years, when watching Ranaut’s awkward, abrasive protagonist’s attempt to unpeel the layers of her stoic, smiley and smart acquaintance. The difference is that Lee boils the suspense whereas Kovelamudi sets off the fire alarm, bathing in a cacophony of uncurbed cinematic flourishes. Judgementall Hai Kya is an orgy of excessive visuals, sounds and performances, especially compared to the controlled hypnosis of the Murakami adaptation. This is Burning on steroids, cocaine and a whole lot of other drugs.

At a certain point, the director culls the wicked humour because he can only go so far in finding the funny within a protagonist diagnosed with acute psychosis. It’s an occasionally unrealised intention that plays like a case of a filmmaker wanting to have his cake and eat it too, but Kovelamudi’s endeavour to pull off a comedic thriller about mental health mostly works. It’s a tough balance to strike, managed largely because the humour is derived from Bobby’s deliberate efforts to amuse, as opposed to us laughing at her. 

Furthermore, the film goes into serious territory with themes that are exclaimed if not explained, such as presenting the predatory behaviour of men in the film industry, as evidenced by the creepy touchy-feely individuals who work in the recording studio, and the link between mental health effects and childhood trauma as the film begins with a sequence of young Bobby watching her parents die from a ledge, an image that crawls back into her head whenever she’s stood at an incline.

Kangana Ranaut delivers a career-best performance, deftly careening between tragedy and comedy to manage the ferocity of her character, and implicitly draws from her own experience of being in an industry that would rather laugh than listen to a voice like hers. The acclaimed actress is known for campaigning for unspoken truths and calling for justice within Bollywood.

It would’ve been wickedly funny if the Keshav character had some sort of nepotism element, considering Ranaut’s particularly strong anti-nepotism stance. Opposite her, Rajkummar Rao’s intensely steely-eyed deadpan works like a charm, though we don’t get to fully unlock the mystery of Keshav, what his past looks like and why he revels in flirting with violence.

Endlessly twisting and turning, the film marches towards an over-the-top finale but it’s difficult to check out at that point on account of the blistering, neon-soaked visuals on display and a commitment to gravitas, no matter how intense the spectacle, by the two leading performers. Judgementall Hai Kya is an intoxicating ride of comic nihilism mixed with social commentary and I would love to take it again.

Next Month

And that concludes the July 2019 edition of Bollywood Inquiry! August will be host to some major releases in both Bollywood and Lollywood thanks to Eid-ul-Adha and India’s Independence Day. Take a look below for the trailer for Mission Mangal, about India’s first interplanetary mission to Mars, featuring a terrific femme-heavy cast that includes Taapsee Pannu and Vidya Balan as well as leading star Akshay Kumar.

Which Bollywood films are you looking forward to this year or have enjoyed so far? Let us know in the comments.