Tag Archives: 0.5 Star

Movie Review: Bawaal (2023)

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0.5 Star (out of 4)

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Bawaal was constructed in an alternate moral universe. One in which a husband confines his wife to their house because he’s embarrassed by her disability and the marriage is considered “troubled,” not abusive. One in which a teacher’s physical violence against a student can be overlooked if he’s deemed a competent instructor. One in which characters find ways to identify with Adolf Hitler, who is condemned for being greedy, not genocidal. One in which romantic relationship problems are compared to the Holocaust.

The romantic drama from filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari certainly looks nice. Cinematographer Mitesh Mirchandani takes full advantage of filming in picturesque locations in France, Germany, and Poland. But the movie itself is indefensible.

Ajay (Varun Dhawan), is a stereotypical Bollywood male main character who needs to grow up. He peaked in high school and has been trying to maintain his cool image ever since. As a disinterested middle school history teacher, Ajay buys the devotion of his students by giving them good grades despite teaching them nothing.

He thought he was getting the ultimate accessory when he married beautiful, smart Nisha (Janhvi Kapoor). She warned him that she had epilepsy, but incurious Ajay didn’t understand what that meant until he witnessed her have a seizure on their wedding night. Fearful of what might happen to his image if Nisha were to have a seizure in public, he made her stop working and forbade her from leaving the house. That was nine months ago.

Now Ajay’s in trouble because he slapped a student. The kid’s dad is a politician who demands the school investigate whether Ajay should keep his job. Ajay plans to repair his image as a lousy husband and teacher by taking Nisha on a two-week trip to Europe to tour World War II historic sites and send video lessons to his students back home. But he makes it clear to Nisha that he’s only doing this for his own benefit, not because he cares about her.

When in Europe, Ajay realizes how worldly his wife is and how attractive other men find her, causing him to reevaluate whether he’s underestimated her value to him. They tour museums and Nisha translates their tour guides’ English narrations into Hindi, helping him to finally gain a shred of empathy.

Even then, Ajay can only sympathize with people from the past by imagining himself in their place (not because they were individuals deserving of life and happiness for their own sake). When he does, the image onscreen changes from color to black and white as Ajay sees himself in events from the past. He stands among soldiers being slaughtered on Normandy Beach, packs a suitcase as Nazi officers urge him to hurry, and calls out to Nisha inside a crowded gas chamber as shirtless men succumb to poison all around him.

The gas chamber sequence is disturbing not because of the imagery but because of the sheer inappropriateness of equating such an evil act to the marital struggles of an abusive husband. Nisha translates an unbelievable speech by a character who is an Auschwitz survivor who says, “Every relationship goes through their Auschwitz.” The Holocaust is not a metaphor.

As seen through the lens applied by Tiwari and his collaborators, World War II is a conflict driven purely by greed for territory. Genocide is never brought up, nor is the Holocaust referred to by name. Very rarely is it even mentioned that the majority of Auschwitz’s million plus victims were Jewish. Instead, Nisha opines that, “We all too are a little like Hitler, aren’t we? We aren’t satisfied with what we have.”

I struggle to understand this interpretation of history. Maybe it’s purely coincidental that a filmmaker from India in 2023 chose to ignore or downplay the Nazi’s systemic persecution and extermination of a religious minority. There’s some irony that Ajay mistreats his wife because of her epilepsy, yet there’s no mention of Hitler’s eugenics program that targeted people with mental and physical disabilities.

Dhawan is competent as Ajay–which he should be, because he’s playing a version of the same character he’s played multiple times in his career already. Kapoor is sympathetic as the neglected wife. But both of them should have bailed on this project once they found out they’d be cosplaying Holocaust victims in a gas chamber.

Either Tiwari and his team have a completely superficial understanding of World War II and didn’t realize the callousness of their story, or they do understand and went ahead anyway because they wanted some novel visuals. Whatever the case, Bawaal is offensive and not worth watching even to see how bad it is.

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Movie Review: Mrs Undercover (2023)

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0.5 Star (out of 4)

Watch Mrs Undercover on Zee5

The action comedy Mrs Undercover is agenda-driven, not story-driven or character-driven. It’s not even clear who the intended audience is for this film that wants to promote women’s empowerment but doesn’t treat the issue with any sophistication.

Instead of first introducing its main character, Durga (Radhika Apte) — a seemingly ordinary housewife — Mrs Undercover opens with the villain, Ajay (Sumeet Vyas): a serial killer who preys on strong, independent women. We hear him beat the feminist lawyer he has tricked into having a date with him before we watch him run over her repeatedly with his car.

This misstep immediately puts the focus on the man committing violence against women, and not the woman who will (ultimately) stand up to him. The very first woman we meet is a victim, and we witness her brutal death.

Ajay goes by the alias “The Common Man,” and he records his victims confessing their crimes against masculinity before murdering them. For some reason, literally everyone in India has their phone set to alert them when The Common Man posts a new video. Why? Who knows?

The special task force assigned to find The Common Man has one last chance to learn his identity. Turns out an undercover agent whose contact information was misplaced happens to live in Kolkata, The Common Man’s new hunting ground. That secret agent is Durga.

Durga married sexist, conservative Dev (Saheb Chatterjee) to establish her cover. But with no word from the special force in a decade, Durga went ahead and started a family. When task force chief Rangeela (Rajesh Sharma) assigns her to the case, she’s not willing to disrupt her family’s routine to do so.

Rangeela’s attempts to bring Durga back into the fold are the funniest part of Mrs Undercover. He surprises her by showing up in odd places wearing disguises that don’t fool anyone.

Sadly, that’s it as far as the laughs go. The dialogue is uninspired, as far as I could tell. Only the Hindi words are subtitled, with the rest reading “???Bengali.” The action scenes are forgettable, too.

That’s because the point of Mrs Undercover isn’t to entertain, but to educate. Somber piano music plays whenever characters launch into heavy-handed speeches about how housewives are special and should be treated with respect. Religious references abound, such as naming the main character Durga and lauding women for managing their households as though they have ten hands.

I’m not sure who writer-director Anushree Mehta is trying to persuade. It’s not like men who look down on women don’t realize they do so. Durga’s husband Dev isn’t a controlling jerk by accident. When Dev’s mother (played by Laboni Sarkar) tries to convince him to allow Durga more freedom, it’s as though Mom has only just realized that her married adult son with whom she lives is sexist.

The characters feel like they came into being just before the events of the film, to serve the purposes of the screenplay. This is especially true in the case of a woman who is one of The Common Man’s accomplices. Why would she agree to help a man who is literally murdering women for refusing to be subservient? We’ll never know, because Durga shoots her before she can explain herself.

Mrs Undercover opens the door to all kinds of feminist issues, only to abandon them or treat them in a simplistic way. Durga joins a Women’s Empowerment group at a local college, and most of the attendees express a desire to start their own businesses. The men running the group instead teach them a choreographed dance routine.

Because the film addresses issues at such a surface level, it doesn’t even realize that movie’s the ultimate message to women is that it isn’t enough to be “just a housewife.” Durga saves the day using skills she learned as a special agent, not abilities she picked up once she started her family. Were she to have succeeded using those skills, the movie might have made a point about all women’s work deserving respect.

The ending assumes that justice is best served via eye-for-an-eye physical retribution meted out individually. Even then, it’s up to women to do the dirty work themselves while men stand and watch. That’s not catharsis. It’s more forced labor for women that absolves men of the work of holding other men accountable. Who does Mrs Undercover think will find this satisfying?

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Movie Review: Kuttey (2023)

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0.5 Star (out of 4)

The joyless, immature heist film Kuttey (“Dogs“) is an inauspicious feature debut for writer-director Aasmaan Bhardwaj (son of filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj, who co-wrote and produced Kuttey).

Kuttey opens in 2003 in a remote police outpost in western Maharashtra. Officer Paaji (Kumud Mishra) listens as jailed Maoist fighter Lakshmi (Konkona Sen Sharma) explains that he’ll never find freedom as a lackey in an oppressive system. She’s proven right when Paaji’s superior officer slaps him for treating Lakshmi compassionately, then rapes Lakshmi in front of him.

Thirteen years later, Paaji is still a cop, but he’s earning money on the side doing jobs for the drug dealer Khobre (Naseeruddin Shah) with fellow cop, Gopal (Arjun Kapoor). Khobre instructs the pair to murder a rival dealer, which they do, along with killing dozens of people at a pool party.

Actually, the rival dealer survives the assassination attempt, albeit in a coma. Paaji’s and Gopal’s boss bribes them to keep their involvement quiet in exchange for a hefty payout. They turn to another sketchy cop named Pammi (Tabu) for advice and learn from her pal Harry (Ashish Vidyarthi) about the route Harry’s armored truck takes on its nightly rounds to refill ATMs with cash. Paaji and Gopal both decide to rob the truck, though not together. Other people get wind of the plan, and chaos ensues.

Kuttey is an extremely violent movie, with a body count in the dozens. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Films full of pointless violence can still make a point themselves. But Kuttey doesn’t. It is violent in an attempt at edginess that just comes across as cruel. Couple that with the passionless sex scenes and foul language, and the film feels like the product of a particularly sheltered middle schooler who finds swearing, sex, and gore in movies endlessly thrilling because they are new to him.

The characters are so poorly defined that there’s no reason to care about any of them. We don’t know enough about these people or or their circumstances to get invested. It also strips all the deaths of meaning since there’s no sense of who is or isn’t deserving of grisly murder or what kind of void they’ll leave behind when they are gone. The goal seems to be the highest body count possible, achieved by any means.

With such hollow characters to work with, the performances in Kuttey are nothing special. That goes for Tabu as well, whose assignment is to cuss and chew scenery. Pammi spends an agonizingly long time telling the parable of the scorpion and the frog, even though everyone already knows it because so many other movies have used it. The whole film moves way too slowly despite having a runtime under two hours.

There’s also an issue with how violence is administered in Kuttey. Virtually every character is subjected to violence. But only women are done so in a punitive way, and not just because they are an obstacle in someone’s pursuit of a greater goal. Besides Lakshmi’s rape, the scene at the pool party thrown by the rival drug dealer is especially problematic. As Paaji and Gopal walk towards the rival dealer to shoot him and his “Nigerian” counterparts (one of whom has an American accent), some unaware bikini-clad white women push the cops into the pool as a joke. Gopal can’t swim, and the women laugh at him as he’s rescued by the American guy. When Gopal recovers enough to pick up his gun, he shoots the laughing women first.

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