After being delayed for a week, Mausam makes its debut in Chicago area theaters on September 23, 2011. The romantic political drama stars Shahid Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor.
The great romantic comedy Mere Brother Ki Dulhan enters its third week at all three of the above theaters. Bodyguard gets a fourth week at the South Barrington 30.
Note that the Indian-Canadian co-production Breakaway — opening this weekend in India under the title Speedy Singhs — releases internationally on September 30.
Other Indian movies showing at the Golf Glen 5 this weekend include Dookudu (Telugu) and Pranayam (Malayalam).
Chalo Dilli is a road trip comedy in which a mismatched pair of strangers are forced to rely upon each other to reach their destination. It’s basically Planes, Trains and Automobiles, only with Steve Martin’s uptight character played by a woman.
That woman is Lara Dutta, who also produced the movie. Dutta plays Mihika, a picky investment banking executive used to getting things her way. She heads to the airport in Mumbai wearing a tight skirt and high heels that look as uncomfortable for air travel as they will be for her inevitable trek through the hinterlands.
Mihika’s journey is disrupted by Muna (Vinay Pathak), a crude cloth merchant with a chivalrous streak. His incessant yammering on the plane prompts Mihika to put on headphones, causing her to miss the announcement that the flight to Delhi has been diverted to Jaipur.
What should be a six-hour drive back to Delhi turns into an overnight adventure for Mihika and Muna, who assumes the role of chauffeur when the driver Mihika has hired falls asleep. The car breaks down, and the odd couple spend many hours together making their way to Delhi any way they can.
This premise should work particularly well in India, with its stark contract between urban and rural environments. The contrast sets up plenty of fish-out-of-water scenarios for city-bred Mihika, who starts the movie disgusted at the thought of flying on a “budget” airline instead of in first class.
But the movie never takes full advantage of its opportunities for comedy. None of the situations Mihika and Muna find themselves in are especially unusual or outrageous. The people they encounter are generally normal and helpful. It makes for a boring trip.
Mihika does get to wake up to a beautiful sunrise in the country and meet friendly locals, which is supposed to open her eyes to Muna’s somewhat odd life wisdom: Don’t sweat the small stuff, because there’s probably something much more serious in your life that you should be worried about.
As much as Chalo Dilli fancies itself an uplifting film, it isn’t really. Manu’s happy-go-lucky demeanor masks an inner pain that manifests itself in cruel jokes at his wife’s expense. The final scene between Mihika and Manu is uncomfortable to watch.
Rather than ending there, the movie tacks on an epilogue montage voiced-over by Mihika detailing the ways the lives of the villagers she and Muna encountered were improved by the experience. The movie gives the contradictory message that the simple life is beautiful, but not so perfect that it can’t be improved by a little attention from some city dwellers.
Chalo Dilli also takes a conflicted view of gender equality. Mihika and Muna argue after he wonders why so many men would be willing to work for her. She accuses him of believing that women should stay home and have babies. So what does Mihika decide to do in the epilogue? Stay home and have babies.
If Mihika had expressed career or life dissatisfaction earlier in the movie, perhaps the choice would’ve made sense. But it’s quite a leap from Mihika making a small gesture, such as delaying a business trip in order to attend a party, to her chucking her whole career to have kids. Axe the unnecessary epilogue and this mixed message isn’t an issue.
With the release of Mausam pushed back to next week, there are no new Hindi movies opening in the Chicago area this weekend. However, there are still a few Bollywood hits lingering in theaters.
Katrina Kaif and Imran Khan have been established Bollywood stars for years, but this has been something of a breakout summer for both of them. Kaif scored big at the box office with Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, and Khan showed serious comedy chops in Delhi Belly.
Headlining Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (“My Brother’s Bride”), Kaif and Khan seem their most at ease in front of the camera. Not only do they share a charming chemistry, but they give two of their strongest individual performances to date.
Khan anchors Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (MBKD, henceforth) as Kush, an aspiring director in India who gets an odd request from his brother in London, Luv (Ali Zafar). Having broken up with his longtime girlfriend, Piali (Tara D’Souza), Luv decides to entrust his romantic future to Kush. Luv asks his younger brother to find a nice Indian girl for him to marry.
Kush enlists his parents and friends to scour Dehradun for a bride for Luv. The ideal candidate turns out to be a reformed party girl named Dimple (Kaif), whom Kush met years earlier during her wilder days. She describes her qualifications thusly: “I am correctly beautiful and appropriately sexy.” She gets the gig.
Predictably, Kush and Dimple fall for each other as they make wedding preparations. Only after Luv arrives do they acknowledge the problem: she’s about to marry the wrong brother.
The fact that MBKD feels a bit like something we’ve seen before is actually its strength. Debutant filmmaker Ali Abbas Zafar (who’s not the Ali Zafar who plays Luv) clearly set out to make a feel-good romantic comedy, and he achieved his goal.
To play up the familiarity, the opening dance number pays homage to some famous Bollywood routines of the recent past. There are plenty of dance numbers, and all of them are entertaining and well-integrated into the plot.
A few slightly unexpected tweaks to the formula are a nice surprise. While Kush is the film’s main character, Dimple does more to drive the story forward. She’s not a passive damsel in distress, but rather an impatient problem solver whose impulsiveness gets her into trouble.
In another unexpected twist, MBKD doesn’t have a villain. I kept waiting for Luv to reveal himself to be an oaf, or for Piala to turn into a “crazy ex-girlfriend,” but all of the characters are nice people. The situation — not the characters — provides the conflict. It’s tricky to pull off, but Abbas Zafar handles it well.
The advantage of this approach is that the story doesn’t get bogged down in maudlin montages of Kush and Dimple staring forlornly into the rain as a singer laments the cruelty of fate. Rather, the lovebirds recognize a problem and set about fixing it.
The lone complaint I have about the movie is that several jokes depend on cultural references that American audiences likely don’t share. There are repeated references to Complan, which I learned after the movie is a British nutritional supplement. (See Ricky’s comment below for a more complete explanation of the Complan references.) This isn’t a reason to avoid the film, but American moviegoers should know in advance that they won’t get all the jokes.
The hits keep coming to the Chicago area with the release of Yash Raj Films’ Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (“My Brother’s Bride) on Friday, September 9. The wacky rom-com stars Katrina Kaif, Imran Khan and Ali Zafar.
All three theaters are understandably carrying over Bodyguard after it made $1,361,790 during its first six days in the U.S. Bol, which earned a much more modest $105,354 in its first six days, is sticking around at the Golf Glen 5 and South Barrington 30.
Last week’s other new release, the compelling but dark That Girl in Yellow Boots, leaves area theaters on Thursday.
The Golf Glen 5 will also carry over the Tamil movie Mankatha for another week.
Note: This movie has no MPAA rating, but it is most definitely for adults only.
Ruth, the title character in That Girl in Yellow Boots, is a puzzle. She’s brave and forthright, yet she subjects herself to conditions unimaginably grim — embarking on a humiliating, painful quest in search of a goal that, were it not so personal, would hardly seem worth pursuing.
Ruth (Kalki Koechlin) leaves England for India to search for her father, a man she doesn’t remember and who her mother has painstakingly erased from their lives. A letter written to Ruth by her father expressing a desire to meet her proves unusually difficult to trace.
Unable to get an official Indian work permit, Ruth works in a disreputable massage parlor performing sex acts, using the proceeds to bribe officials to extend her travel visa. Being a white woman alone in India makes Ruth both a novelty and an object of desire. Her growing knowledge of Hindi puts her in the odd position of being neither a local nor a tourist.
The lone bright spot in Ruth’s life is not her druggie boyfriend, Prashant (Prashant Prakash), but Diwakar (Naseeruddin Shah), the only client who actually comes to Ruth just for the massage. He’s the father figure she’s been looking for, if only she could put aside her quest.
As the conditions of Ruth’s life go from bad to worse, it’s hard not to ask: Why? Why not give up the search? Why not go home, make some money doing something more dignified and resume the search later? But by the time we meet Ruth, she’s sacrificed so much that she seems unable to stop.
There’s also the question of why her father hasn’t made more of an effort than just writing a letter. If Ruth succeeds in finding him, can he possibly be worth the effort it took?
Koechlin is amazing as Ruth. The camera (behind which sits her real-life husband, director Anurag Kashyap) lingers on Ruth’s face, her blank expression showing the price she’s chosen to pay, shutting off her emotions while she seeks the one person she believes will love her without wanting anything in return.
Koechlin co-wrote the screenplay with Kashyap and used experiences from her own life to flavor Ruth’s world. Raised in India by French parents, Koechlin says she remembers being treated at times as though her skin color indicated an amoral character. Note that, in the movie, the other masseuses at the parlor are blonde.
That Girl in Yellow Boots is not fun, but Koechlin’s performance and Kashyap’s tense and thoughtful directing make watching it a worthwhile experience.
If a film’s quality was measured by the delighted shrieks of women in the audience, Bodyguard would be the greatest movie of all time. The women at my screening went bonkers every time Salman Khan flexed a bicep or busted a dance move. When a firehose blasted Khan’s shirt off his body, I feared a riot.
Sadly, there’s little else going for Bodyguard besides Khan’s buff physique.
It’s not fair to compare all of Khan’s movies to last year’s hit, Dabangg, but that movie showed just how good Khan can be when he’s allowed to play a character who’s in on the joke: no one is as honest, charismatic or freakishly strong as the characters Khan normally plays.
Bodyguard feels like a step back. It’s as though the filmmaker, Siddique, didn’t trust the audience enough to buy Khan as more than the super-heroic caricature he’s played countless times before. Either that, or Siddique didn’t know any other way to write for the superstar.
Khan plays Lovely Singh, Mumbai’s best bodyguard. He’s so devoted to his work that he doesn’t have a personal life. Right off the bat, he saves a bunch of girls from human traffickers, causing a large amount of carnage in the process. An over-reliance on CGI effects makes the fight less impressive than it could have been.
The traffickers Lovely stops have it in for benevolent rich guy Sartaj (Raj Babbar) and put a hit on his daughter, Divya (Kareena Kapoor). Lovely agrees to serve as Divya’s bodyguard until she finishes college and moves to London. Sartaj’s only condition is that Lovely not tell Divya she’s in danger.
Lovely’s stern manner embarrasses Divya and her best friend, Maya (Hazel Keech), and the girls try to get him to loosen up. Divya invents an alter-ego, “Chhaya”, and sets about wooing Lovely over the phone. He falls for his pretend paramour and begins to let his guard down, potentially endangering Divya in the process.
For the first hour and forty-five minutes, Bodyguard is an amusing — if uninspired — action movie with a romantic subplot. But, after the bad guys have been vanquished, the attempt in the final half hour to wrap up the romance storyline comes out of left field.
While I’m all for breaking with tradition, it has to be done with an understanding of why the tradition exists in the first place. For example, when two characters fall in love, it has to be for reasons other than the fact that the movie would end on a down note if they didn’t. The ending to Bodyguard tries to buck tradition and just winds up absurd and tacked-on.
Though the music and dance numbers are pretty good (especially “Teri Meri”, the video of which I’ve embedded below), the rest of Bodyguard feels stale. Jokes at the expense of dwarves, gays and the morbidly obese are crude and tired. As usual, Khan beats up the bad guys and Kapoor looks beautiful and stylish; there’s nothing to stretch them as actors. A shame, since there’s a lot of talent between them.
There are a flurry of new releases this week in honor of the Eid holiday, and Chicago theaters are getting in on the action starting on Wednesday. The marquee title is Bodyguard, starring Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor.
Also opening in the same three theaters on Wednesday is the Pakistani film Bol. I’ve seen its language listed variously as Hindi and Urdu. It has a runtime of 2 hrs. 45 min.
These aren’t the only new films opening in the Chicago area this week. On Friday, September 2, the Hindi movie That Girl in Yellow Boots opens at the Golf Glen 5 and South Barrington 30. It’s runtime is listed as 1 hr. 43 min.
I’m tempted to cut Love Express some slack since it begins with the disclaimer: “A film by debutant artists and technicians.” But lack of experience can’t excuse an inferior product, and Love Express stinks.
While it didn’t cost me any money to watch (the full movie is legally available for free on YouTube), I can’t understand why the studio, Mukta Arts, thought it was ready for commercial distribution.
The saddest thing about Love Express is that its premise is great:
A pair of young strangers — traveling by train with their families, en route to their arranged marriage — confess to each other that they don’t want to get married. They conspire to derail the wedding plans but aren’t prepared for the consequences when their scheme works.
The premise practically pitches itself. There’s a built-in deadline — matters have to be resolved before the train gets to its destination — and the characters are forced to deal with the problem because they’re trapped on a moving train. Couple the deadline and the confined spaces with familial pressure, and you should have box office gold.
But, in the hands of an inexperienced crew, the film doesn’t come together. Some of the train interiors look cheaply constructed. The sounds and sway of the camera that are supposed to mimic a moving train are inconsistently applied. The song that accompanies the lone choreographed dance number is annoying.
Apart from the great premise, the writing is pretty bad. Dialogue is clunky and characters woefully underdeveloped. The main couple — Kanav (Sahil Mehta) and Asneet (Mannat Ravi) — have such an abrupt change of heart that even they can’t come up with good reasons why they’re suddenly in love. Kanav gets misty eyed remembering when Asneet called him “dog brain,” and Asneet proudly bears a stain on her saree from that time Kanav spilled hot tea on her.
Not only are the characters poorly written, but they are poorly acted as well. Ravi is fine as Asneet, but Mehta’s Kanav is an irritating boor. There’s little help from the supporting cast, with the exception of Roobie as Asneet’s mother.
Om Puri, the only recognizable actor in the movie, is limited in what he can bring to the table. His character, Asneet’s grandfather, is confined to his berth on the train. His actions are supposed to change the course of the film, but they feel less impactful since he never interacts directly with the main characters.
I respect the fact that Mukta Arts and producer Subhash Ghai want to open doors for artists and technicians new to the industry, but the gesture is meaningless without guidance. Having their names attached to such a dud of a film may actually do the debutants’ careers more harm than good.
New theatrical releases are on hold for another week in anticipation of the Salman Khan/Kareena Kapoor-starrer Bodyguard next Friday. Until then, the selection of Bollywood films in Chicago area theaters is limited to Aarakshan at the Big Cinemas Golf Glen 5 in Niles and AMC South Barrington 30 in South Barrington and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara at the Golf Glen 5 only. ZNMD‘s U.S. earnings have surpassed $3 million.
This downtime is a good chance to catch up on movies from earlier this year that you may have missed. Netflix recently added Thank You to its streaming catalog, and Yamla Pagla Deewana and Chalo Dilli are now available through the rental service on DVD. YouTube has an impressive selection of free Hindi movies, including a smaller release I reviewed earlier this month: Cycle Kick.
Other Indian flicks showing at the Golf Glen 5 this weekend include the Telugu films Dhada, Kandireega and Money Money More Money and the Tamil movie Rowthiram.
