Bollywood Inquiry November 2019: BALA, DRIVE & MARJAAVAAN

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, for varying reasons.

Bala (dir. Amar Kaushik)

Like tennis biopics and Fyre festival documentaries, films about premature baldness are like buses – you wait awhile then two of them arrive at once. At the start of this month, theatregoers were given the choice to spend their hard-earned money between Udja Chaman and Bala – of course, the more curiously inclined would have seen both but would have only been half lucky. Bala is the significantly better film, a simple, fun character study of a twenty-something man learning to live with alopecia in a world with a discriminatory idea of beauty.

Capping off a stellar decade that saw him ascend from MTV video jockey to the biggest movie star of his generation, Ayushmann Khurrana increases the intensity of his flame, as Bala opened in over 3550 screens worldwide, his widest release yet. It has done very well at the box office (as it should) but it seems the actor is taking a Spielbergian approach to scripts – one for the fans, one for himself – alternating between radical, adult-oriented fare, like Andhadhun and Article 15, and safe, wholesome, universally appealing stuff like Dream Girl and Bala.

Certainly the latter can help facilitate studio investment into the former, but these types of films feel a little inessential in comparison. The capacity for something with bite is palpable here but the intent to be as popcorn-friendly as possible doesn’t seem to work without sanitising the social commentary. The intent is to simply be a pleasant time for families with a skin-deep engagement with real issues and, in that regard, Bala is a success, an enjoyable entertainment that coasts entirely on the strength of the lead.

Bala begins with a scene of a balding teacher mercilessly teased by his preteen students, the de facto leader of whom is the lively Balmukund “Bala” Shukla. Also subject to his mockery is the dark-complexioned classmate Latika (played as an adult by Khurrana’s repeat co-star Bhumi Pednekar). Cut to years later and Bala continues the jokery by putting in work as a stand-up comic at night, and paying the bills by working as a fairness cream salesman – a harmful industry that doesn’t really get called out the way it deserves to.

A wig provides some respite to Bala’s premature balding issue but life gets trickier when he falls in love with famous fair-skinned model Pari Mishra (Yami Gautam) working with his team on a campaign for the cream, and subsequently weds her whilst hiding the truth of his natural depilation. Latika, now a lawyer, still exists in Bala’s life, particularly as it’s the girls with her complexion who are the targets of the skin-lightening product.

Her parents try to find her a suitor but she’s repeatedly rejected for her skin colour. As everyone knows each other in these small geographical confines, Latika’s aunt covertly requests Bala to set up an Instagram profile for her niece which features airbrushed photos of Latika, designed to increase her potential matches. Latika’s furor at Bala causes a palaver with his marriage to Pari, and the gradual post-interval tonal shift becomes a dialogue around ideas of beauty and not being afraid to be who you are.

Khurrana is as charming as ever, outshining his peer Sunny Singh, the star of Udja Chaman, in every way. He’s especially good as the budding comedian – a great mimic, with an A1 impression of Ranbir Kapoor – and, as the cream salesman, he fights against the script’s inertia at exploring the link between societal pressures and biology. Bala’s colleagues are brilliant at functioning as automatons; their tone-deafness to promoting a capital-driven, colonialist, racist idea is an accidentally effective outcome, rather than something worth crediting to the screenplay.

Bhumi Pednekar on the other hand… sheesh. For the role of a Kanpur native, she dons brownface, the Desi equal to blackface. That’s twice in a row where she’s been offensively miscast. An earnest character like Latika is reduced to an uncomfortable spectacle because of the distracting makeup. I can only imagine that the reason is commercially based but why not make a star out of a dark-skinned actor, especially when the leading actor is a box office draw. When Latika delivers a monologue about not changing who you are, it rings screechingly hollow.

Abhishek Banerjee reunites with his co-star from Dream Girl in a supporting role, carving out a niche as the Rob Schneider to Ayushmann’s Adam Sandler (if their films together were competent, mind you). The envelope for family content is fiercely pushed with jokes about pubic hair and sperm – or maybe the outrage for such subject matter isn’t as it would be in a PG-13 Happy Madison production.

Bala is the most 2019 film ever not least because of the star – there are references to Thanos, Tik Tok, dabbing, flossing, etc. The references are hit and miss but a Tik Tok montage with Bala and Pari together is a novel way to show the passage of time from their first date to their wedding day, a gimmick cloaked by the joy of them singing and dancing along to songs from classic Hindi cinema.

Just like Dream Girl before it, Bala has a tendency to tackle culturally bold issues with a light touch – almost infantilising the ideas about body image – before the third act shifts to full-blown didacticism, providing cheap food for thought. There’s the serious Ayushmann and the comedic, both who offer a purpose to their films beyond plain entertainment, albeit only one is great cinema. I’ll keenly follow his career but am hoping for more of the hard-hitting kind or at least efforts that strike a greater balance.

Drive (dir. Tarun Mansukhani)

It’s crazy how super producer Karan Johar, whose influence in the industry is akin to Spielberg’s in Hollywood, couldn’t get a theatrical release for this flashy action picture. Initially slated to be released in September 2018, it was pushed to June 2019. Distribution failed to materialise, so it subsequently joined Andy Serkis’ Mowgli in the high-profile dumping ground of Netflix.

Drive is the second pop at James Sallis’ titular novel after Nicolas Winding Refn’s stellar Ryan Gosling-starrer. You’d think another adaptation won’t need to be made, at the very least to avoid negative comparisons to the original adaptation, right? Drive 2019 proves Tarun Mansukhani to be unfit for even a provisional licence to direct, presenting a watered-down, technically deficient bore that may as well have been renamed Drivel.

The enigma and style of Refn’s film is absent in this vapid street racer flick, the convoluted plot of which revolves around a street racing gang who get into cahoots with other street racing gangs, hackers and police to target a hotshot criminal named King who’s in possession of a few hundred kilograms of gold.

It centers on the two best looking characters, street race gang leader Tara (Jacqueline Fernandez) and skilled thief Samar (Sushant Singh Rajput), coupling them in a bid to give the dated premise some appeal. The poor dialogue and make-up-as-you-go-along structure of this thing suggest a bot was forced to watch 1000 hours of heist movies and write a script of its own.

It wants to resemble a certain film franchise but the famously illogical Fast & Furious series would have to bend over backwards to try and be as creatively bankrupt as this product. I really didn’t like the Need for Speed movie but that at least had some panache with its old-fashioned, zero-CG stunts, whereas some driving shots here look like poor miniature work, as if they were captured from a Hot Wheels set. I couldn’t believe I would one day consider Need for Speed as a palate cleanser but here we are.

Jacqueline Fernandez does more modelling than acting as the Vin Diesel surrogate, literally walking out of her sports car to wind machines and monolights, fashionably posing until the infatuated director snaps out of his gaze. Equally inept is Sushant Singh Rajput, destroying the goodwill he earned with a sublime turn earlier this year in Sonchiriya. He makes a convincing argument for why dead actors should be resurrected via CGI take lead roles.

The songs deserve a newly created Razzie for Worst Lip Syncing and, even outside of them, there’s some truly appalling ADR work that implies that a new script was delivered during post-production. Not just a few words – entire passages appear to rewritten and applied to out-of-sync mouths with no expectation of us to notice.

I’m praying the director justifies himself by saying it was his intention to rebel against conventional formalism after the fact, like how Tommy Wiseau recontextualised The Room as a black comedy once people couldn’t help but howl. 

In the words of College & Electric Youth, is this version of Drive “a real hero”? Nope, it’s just a real villain to modern sensibilities.

Marjaavaan (dir. Milap Zaveri)

We can easily think about beloved actor pair-ups in a romantic context, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone, SRK and Kajol, SRK and Preity Zinta, SRK and – hell, half the damn industry.

And we can just as easily think of friendship ones – Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, Seth Rogen and James Franco, etc. But how many hero-villain team-ups can we name? I can’t really think of any contemporary examples but Student of the Year star Sidharth Malhotra and Housefull hero Riteish Deshmukh are forming such a partnership themselves, first with the unofficial I Saw the Devil remake Ek Villain and now continuing with this action melodrama.

Marjaavaan is a Shakespearean tale – even the dialogue is sub-Bard, employing the occasional Hindi rhyming couplet – that follows Raghu (Malhotra), a water mafia thug who re-examines his choices when he falls in love with the kind-hearted mute music teacher Zoya (Tara Sutaria), who represents everything opposed to his current lifestyle. You know how it goes – opposites attract.

His boss is the powerful, corrupt Narayan Anna (Nassar), who considers Raghu his favourite goon. Narayan’s diminutive son Vishnu (Deshmukh) doesn’t like their alliance and sets off on a warpath to undercut Raghu’s credibility. His job gets a whole lot easier when he eyes Zoya as a bargaining chip, kidnapping kids taught by her and executing associates in the pursuit to break the central pair apart.

A tragic hero, a tragic waste, troubled love – all the hallmarks of a classic tragedy are here, complete with unabashedly sentimental images like a lover dying in their other half’s arms in the pouring rain and a climactic fight wherein the characters stab each other at the same time. It’s all hilariously over-the-top, made all the more enjoyable because the filmmakers are so earnest.

The action scenes are an unholy mix between WWE and anime. Bodies fly at least twenty yards after a strike and bounce like basketballs on their way down to the muddy, bloody canvas. It’s stylised to a fault, making Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet somehow look simultaneously pedestrian and precise in execution. In the daftest Oliver Stone impersonation, images flash to black-and-white at random intervals. I’m pretty sure this 150-minute movie is really just a two-hour feature elongated by the liberal use of slo-mo.

Nobody involved with this film is in on the hokeyness, bestowing Marjaavaan with an authentic “so bad it’s good” label. Malhotra tries his best at expounding his range from vulnerable to invincible but reveals that he doesn’t have the dramatic chops to be a bona fide leading man. He’s got the apt biceps and the headband for the part of a broken hero, though, so maybe his future is more akin to Sylvester Stallone’s than Shah Rukh Khan’s.

On the opposing side, the 5’8” Deshkmukh is uncomfortably comfortable at playing a villainous dwarf who revels in corporeal puns, like Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Mr Freeze in the similarly campy Batman & Robin, typically asking “you know what’s the height of (insert adjective)” as the prelude to a one-liner. He plunges into the nadir of his career delivering the line, “You know what’s the height of evil? Three feet tall!” before pumping lead into one of his adversaries. The ethics of representation are violated, but, as with everything else here, it’s impossible to take seriously.

There’s more life in the promotional images for Sutaria‘s character than there is in her actual performance, although the fault is largely with a script that reduces Zoya to sobbing for 75% of the time. Co-star Rakul Preet Singh, who lurks in the background as a bar dancer with eyes for Raghu, suffers under a director who sexualises her dance sequences despite her character’s background as a woman employed – exploited – by a sordid slave trade.

Marjaavaan is one of those movies that you’ll laugh about with your friends remembering the most ridiculous moments because you’re fed with so many. Here are some examples: Raghu’s Muslim friend performs salat whilst getting beat up by Vishnu’s henchmen – each strike propels him into the next praying position thus allowing him to complete his prayers despite the pack of thugs pouncing on him. 

A policeman lends his support to the protagonist for the following day’s big showdown by offering this howler: “There’s a saying in India: the police are always late to the scene. I assure you… the police will be late tomorrow.” And Vishnu’s cup of tea quivers due to the vibration of an enormous bodyguard who literally cracks the floor as he walks, and who is said to have “protected dictators everywhere from Morocco to Mexico” – where the hell is his movie?!

Next Month

You can expect more films reviews in next month’s column as December is looking stacked, and you might have heard that there’s a major movie opening worldwide on December 20… nope, not Star Wars... Cats? Too obscure… I’m talking about Dabangg 3 of course!