Tag Archives: Janhvi Kapoor

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: Good Luck Jerry (2022)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

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The vibe of director Siddharth Sen’s debut feature Good Luck Jerry feels like a toned-down Ludo or Looop Lapeta. But trendy aesthetics can’t compensate for a disorganized screenplay and a lack of character development.

Janhvi Kapoor lends her undeniable charisma to Jerry Kumari, a young woman willing to do whatever it takes to provide for her family after her father’s death. Jerry’s mom Sharbati (Mita Vashisht) isn’t happy about her daughter’s job at a massage parlor, but the family needs the money, especially while Jerry’s younger sister Cherry (Samta Sudiksha) finishes school.

Their financial situation gets worse when Sharbati is diagnosed with lung cancer. Unable to get a loan for Sharbati’s treatment, Jerry uses a serendipitous connection to put a risky scheme into action.

While shopping at a market with Cherry, Jerry is forced by a neck-brace-wearing gangster named Timmy (Jaswant Singh Dalal) to recover a packet of drugs hidden in the men’s restroom. There are police all over the market, but they won’t suspect a young woman of carrying drugs. Jerry succeeds, and Timmy lets the sisters go. The next day, Jerry finds Timmy and convinces him to hire her as a drug runner on a permanent basis.

The new gig earns Jerry more than enough money, but it earns her enemies among the drug dealers as well. Timmy’s boss sets her up to fail with a job that’s too big to pull off — at least not without the help of her family.

In keeping with the colorful dark comedy style of movies like Ludo and Looop Lapeta, Good Luck Jerry‘s world is populated by weirdos. Jerry has to fend off romantic overtures from 40-something wannabe rapper Rinku (Deepak Dobriyal), and Cherry has her own suitor who hounds her while dressed in a groom’s attire. The criminals she meets are quirky, though not as memorable as Pankaj Tripathi’s neck-brace-wearing gangster Sattu from Ludo.

If anything, Good Luck Jerry seems like a watered-down version of other films in the same genre. It’s not as visually interesting, the characters are forgettable, and the comedy isn’t edgy enough. Also, Jerry’s final scheme seems overly complex, and the movie makes no attempt to explain how she, her mom, and her sister were able to pull it off.

Even though it’s based on the Tamil film Kolamaavu Kokila, the screenplay feels like an early draft. Jerry doesn’t grow at all; she begins and ends the movie as a woman who will do anything for her family. Sheer volume of characters — and the inflated runtime that comes with them — is treated as more important than fewer, more impactful ones. Dobriyal’s Rinku suffers particularly from this. He and Jerry don’t have much of a relationship, so including him in a climactic shootout doesn’t actually raise the stakes for Jerry. He just takes up space and screentime.

Kapoor, Sudiksha, and Vashisht share a delightful rapport and make a really cute family. Good Luck Jerry needed more of them and less of everybody else.

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Movie Review: Gunjan Saxena — The Kargil Girl (2020)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Gunjan Saxena didn’t set out to be the Indian Air Force’s first woman combat pilot. She just wanted to fly. While the movie based on her life — Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl — shows some of the key events in her pathbreaking career, it focuses more on how her extraordinary willpower and the support of her devoted father helped her make history.

Gunjan grew up in the 1980s wanting to be a pilot. A clever song sequence shows young Gunjan (played by cute Riva Arora) wearing aviator sunglasses and playing with toy planes to the tune of “Mann Ki Dori.” Lyrics like, “From the moment I saw you, I just can’t get you out of my head,” describe first love, but it’s love between a girl and an airplane.

Her father, Anup (Pankaj Tripathi), believes his daughter can accomplish anything she puts her mind to. He’s determined to help her, even over the objections of Gunjan’s mother Kirti (Ayesha Raza Mishra) and Gunjan’s older brother Anshuman (played by Aaryan Arora as a kid and Angad Bedi as an adult.) Mom and brother claim to want to save Gunjan from heartbreak in a world that limits the options for girls and women, but their attitudes just reinforce those limitations.

As she grows up, Gunjan (played as an adult by Janhvi Kapoor) proves herself an overachiever, topping her classes and doing whatever is required to reach her goal. Joining the Air Force’s first class of women pilots turns out to be the quickest way for her to get in the air. When Gunjan fails the Air Force fitness exam by being seven kilograms overweight, she and Anup train using a diet and exercise routine movie superstar Rekha mentioned in a magazine.

The relationship between father and daughter is the heart of Gunjan Saxena. First-time writer-director Sharan Sharma took the advice of his co-writer Nikhil Mehrotra, who previously wrote great family-oriented films like Dangal, Panga, and Chhichhore. Sharma told First Post that, given the volume of excellent source material, “the biggest difficulty in a film of this nature is deciding what should not go into it.” Given how delightful Tripathi and Kapoor are together, focusing the story on their bond was clearly the right move.

Gunjan Saxena is only Kapoor’s third lead role, and she proves herself completely capable of carrying a feature film. She makes it looks easy, whether the challenges facing Gunjan are physical or emotional.

Whatever Anshuman’s motivations were for warning Gunjan against being a pilot, he was right that not everyone would be pleased about her choice. She realizes that after she becomes the first woman at her assigned Air Force base. From petty annoyances like not having a dedicated restroom to outright hostility from some of her fellow soldiers, she faces the extent to which some men will go to exclude women from certain spaces. A scene in which Gunjan’s commanding officer Dileep Singh (Viineet Kumar) finally tells her why he doesn’t think she belongs is heartbreaking. Kapoor handles the scene with grace and finesse.

The film’s action sequences when Gunjan is called into service during the Kargil War are well-executed and thrilling. The cinematic license Sharma takes with events ramps up the excitement and emotional resonance.

There’s a lovely scene in which Gunjan discusses the meaning of patriotism with her father, asking whether the desire to fly is sufficient reason to join the Air Force. Anup — a career military man himself — replies that patriotism isn’t measured by who shouts slogans the loudest, but by whether one does their duty to the best of their ability. It’s a fitting way to distill the real Gunjan Saxena’s approach to her life and a fine way to describe Janhvi Kapoor’s portrayal of her.

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Movie Review: Ghost Stories (2020)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

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Ghost Stories is the third installment in the Hindi anthology series from directors Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, and Karan Johar, following Bombay Talkies and the Netflix Original Lust Stories. The latest is a strong collection, but some of the short films are more enjoyable than others.

Akhtar’s opening short is a fitting introduction to the overall theme, with a beautiful young woman in a creepy house. Janhvi Kapoor plays Sameera, a home health nurse sent to care temporarily for bedridden dementia patient Mrs. Malik (Surekha Sikri). Sameera was told Mrs. Malik’s adult son was taking care of her over the weekend, but there’s no sign of him when Sameera arrives at the cluttered, dimly lit apartment. Mrs. Malik says he’s hiding. Suspicious sounds in the hallway tip Sameera off that something is very wrong.

Akhtar bucks horror conventions by making Sameera a woman of questionable ethics, rather than some imperiled virgin. She invites her married boyfriend over for a romantic rendezvous and riffles through Mrs. Malik’s jewelry box. Instead of being about virtue under threat, Akhtar’s story explores which morals really matter when times get tough, and what obligations we have to other people and ourselves.

Anurag Kashyap’s story is next. It’s the most ambitious but least successful of the four films. After her first child died minutes after its birth, Neha (Sobhita Dhulipala) has eventually become pregnant again. She’s still struggling with the psychological damages from her previous loss. On top of that, the little boy she babysits, Ansh (Zachary Braz), isn’t keen on sharing her affections with anyone else. And she may have been cursed by a bird.

There’s so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of why things happen, let alone differentiate between what’s real and what’s not. Is Neha simply paranoid or out of touch with reality? Is she cursed, or does Ansh really have some kind of evil powers to harm her unborn child? Everything ends in gory, bizarre chaos. Women with a history of fertility problems or miscarriages may find this film disturbing.

The gore-fest continues in the third film, director Dibakar Banerjee’s parable of a small village literally cannibalized by its big-city neighbors. A bureaucrat (played by Sukant Goel) arrives in Smalltown to find it destroyed, with a boy (Aditya Shetty) and a girl (Eva Ameet Pardeshi) the only survivors. They explain that her father — a councilman from Bigtown — ate most of the residents and turned everyone else into zombies. Only when the man is nearly eaten himself does he accept that they kids are telling the truth.

Despite some truly disgusting moments, this is an intriguing story of greed and the sacrifices people will to make to save themselves. Banerjee does an excellent job building a world and giving his audience a lot to chew on (cannibal pun intended).

The anthology’s closing tale is much what you’d expect from a Karan Johar ghost story. Two rich and very attractive people, Ira (Mrunal Thakur) and Dhruv (Avinash Tiwary), agree to marry. When Dhruv interrupts their honeymoon lovemaking to say “good night” to his grandmother — who’s been dead for twenty years — Ira wonders what kind of mental illness afflicts her new husband. But maybe she’s the one who can’t see the ghost right in front of her.

Johar’s story is a light, fun respite after the two heavy shorts that came before it. Dhruv’s family mansion is gorgeous. There’s also a minor theme about faith that gives the story some dimension.

Other than Kashyap’s dense narrative, the stories all suit the short film format. They say what they need to say and end before they run out of steam. There are so many ideas in Kashyap’s story that he might have been able to better organize them in a feature-length film. Overall, Ghost Stories is an interesting collection that creates chilling scenarios without relying on jump scares. Just be ready for some blood and guts.

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