Tag Archives: Saiyami Kher

Movie Review: Agni (2024)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Agni has novelty on its side, as Hindi films about firefighters are rare. The film’s action scenes are exciting, but the family drama interspersed throughout drags.

Set in 2017, Agni follows the crew of a Mumbai firehouse, led by their chief, Vitthal (Pratik Gandhi). A series of high-rise fires cause massive damage and the death of a firefighter. It’s not long before the station’s investigator Avni (Saiyami Kher) finds a connection between accelerants found at multiple scenes. It looks like the city has an arsonist on the loose, and a skilled one at that.

Meanwhile, the police are looking for the perpetrator of a daring daytime assassination of a politician. The investigation is led by Vitthal’s brother-in-law Samit (Divyenndu), one of Mumbai’s top cops. Samit and his officers beat and threaten to kill suspects until they get a lead connecting them to some of the burned buildings. If the police and firefighters work together, they can solve the case in no time, right?

Not so fast. In the film, the police look down on firefighters, who get a much smaller share of public accolades and government funding compared to the cops. This feeling of disrespect is heightened for Vitthal, whose pre-teen son Amya (Kabir Shah) idolizes his uncle Samit.

As someone who lives outside India, I feel at a disadvantage because I’m not sure if public disrespect for firefighters is real and if there’s a rivalry with the police or they are just conceits of the movie. If they are, then the story may have had an underlying levels of context easily understood by locals. If it’s not, filmmaker Rahul Dholakia’s script — co-written with Vijay Maurya — needed to elaborate on how this disrespect manifests. The film is light on specifics.

Most of the inter-agency disrespect in the story comes from mean-spirited jokes directed at Vitthal at a housewarming party in Sumit’s new luxury apartment. That party scene is awkward, as is a family dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The rivalry between Sumit and Vitthal isn’t interesting, and it takes away from the real source of Vitthal’s hurt: the fact that Amya has grown up and no longer sees his dad as the coolest guy on the planet. The father-son angle has much more emotional appeal but doesn’t get enough screentime.

Even more time is wasted on scenes inside Sumit’s police station, where he and his cronies beat confessions out of people. If the story is about firefighters, focus on the firefighters.

Agni is at its best when Vitthal’s crew is actively battling blazes. The action scenes are well-executed and exciting, with lots of real flames. Any CGI is integrated so well as not to draw attention to itself, and the editing makes it seem as though the characters are in real danger.

Gandhi does a fine job as the character holding all the narrative threads together. He’s at his best in scenes with other firefighters like Avni, his friend Jazz (Udit Arora), and fellow station chief Mahadev (Jitendra Joshi). Sai Tamhankar gives an understated performance as Vitthal’s wife Ruku. I wish she’d played a bigger role.

Despite some slow parts in the first half, Agni‘s story pace picks up as it nears its conclusion. Dholakia’s screenplay sprinkles enough action scenes throughout to reward one’s continued attention.

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Movie Review: Sharmajee Ki Beti (2024)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

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First-time feature director Tahira Kashyap Khurrana (wife of actor Ayushmann Khurrana) shows a lot of promise with her comedy-drama Sharmajee Ki Beti (“Sharmajee’s Daughter“). The story peeks into the lives of five women and girls–all with the last name Sharma–living in the same apartment building, as they deal with different gender-related problems.

Kashyap Khurrana makes the mistake that plenty of filmmakers have made before by treating “women’s issues” as a single theme that can be addressed in its entirety in one film. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it does make the screenplay — which was written Kashyap Khurrana — feel unfocused at times.

The character whose arc least successfully integrates with the rest is that of Tanvi Sharma (Saiyami Kher), a single woman living in the building. She’s a state-level cricket player, but her actor boyfriend Rohan (Ravjeet Singh) only cares about her looks. Kher does a fine job showing Tanvi’s attempts to reconcile her self-image with the one Rohan wants her to present, but it’s a thin premise. The movie wouldn’t have suffered without her plotline.

Kashyap Khurrana had everything she needed for a full film with the four remaining Sharma ladies: the mother-daughter pairs of Jyoti (Sakshi Tanwar) & Swati (Vanshika Taparia) and Kiran (Divya Dutta) & Gurveen (Arista Mehta). Daughters Swati and Gurveen are 13-year-old best friends. Jyoti teaches at a coaching center, while Kiran is a stay-at-home mom.

Between them, Jyoti and Kiran face a lot of the problems of modern motherhood. Jyoti struggles to balance her career and the satisfaction it gives her with her duties to her sweet husband Sudhir (Sharib Hashmi) and to Swati. On the flip side, Kiran feels isolated after moving from Patiala to Mumbai, especially with her businessman husband Vinod (Parvin Dabas) acting distant and staying out late. Tanwar and Dutta are both terrific, but Dutta really makes the most of her sympathetic role.

The real stars of Sharmajee Ki Beti are the girls, Swati and Gurveen. The whole movie could have been about them. Their story arcs are that endearing and their performances are that charming. Swati is OBSESSED with the fact that she’s the only girl in her class that hasn’t gotten her period yet. Gurveen tolerates Swati’s constant menstrual talk, while coming to grips with her own preoccupation with one of the pretty older girls at school.

Kashyap Khurrana’s strongest attribute as a director is her faith in her actors, and that faith extends to the two teens playing Swati and Gurveen. The girls have long dialogue exchanges that are shot in one take, and Taparia and Mehta are more than up to the task. Their scenes together are the most immersive in the movie, because they feel like real friends. Keeping the camera on them for as long as Kashyap Khurrana does while both of them are in frame adds to the immersion.

I cannot say enough wonderful things about Vanshika Taparia as Swati. She gives an outstanding performance. She’s hysterically funny when bemoaning her delayed puberty. She’s also crushing in the way only a teen girl can be when her mom forgets to pick her up from school. The recent boom (comparatively speaking) in Hindi movies about teenagers gives me hope that we’ll get to see more of Taparia sooner rather than later. Her performance alone is reason enough to watch Sharmajee Ki Beti.

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Movie Review: Mirzya (2016)

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mirzya3 Stars (out of 4)

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Mirzya is a feast for the eyes and ears, an ambitious tale of doomed love. Sadly, the lovers leave something to be desired.

Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra weaves past and present together in a story written by Gulzar and based on the Punjabi folktale Mirza Sahiban. For the sake of an international audience who may be unfamiliar with the folktale, the characters in Mirzya freely quote Shakespeare’ Romeo and Juliet, just so we all know where this is going.

As children, Munish and Suchitra are inseparable. He chivalrously carries her schoolbag, even though she’s several inches taller than him. Suchitra lies to save Munish when he forgets his homework yet again, literally taking a hit from the teacher for him. Munish can’t bear to see Suchitra harmed, but the revenge he takes upon the teacher leads to the two being separated.

Many years later, Suchitra (Saiyami Kher) is engaged to rich, handsome Karan (Anuj Choudhry). Scenes from Suchitra’s adult life are intercut with a fantastical series of flashbacks from ancient times. In these flashbacks, Suchitra is Sahiba, princess of a tribe of warriors. As the strongest men compete for her hand in marriage, Sahiba’s gaze favors a bold archer named Mirzya (Harshvardhan Kapoor, son of Anil Kapoor), an outsider of whom her family disapproves.

The present-day Mirzya is Adil, a groom at Karan’s stable. Karan tasks Adil with teaching Suchitra how to ride a horse. For no apparent reason, Suchitra assumes that Adil is really Munish. Of course, she is correct.

Everything about Mirzya is visually stunning, from the cast to the costumes to the settings. The vast, rocky valley to which Mirzya and Sahiba escape looks like it was made to be the preferred setting for lovers on the run. When the screen isn’t saturated in the brightly colored costumes of lithe dancers, austere greys evoke the heartache to come.

Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s soundtrack is a wonder, mixing traditional melodies with modern metal and jazz riffs. Mehra turns up the volume during song numbers, then dramatically cuts out all other sounds save footsteps or the flapping of a bird’s wings once the song ends. The effect is thrilling.

Unfortunately, the central love story has problems, chiefly relating to the ages of the characters when significant events take place. When Munish and Suchitra reunite as adults, they are far too old to enter into such an obviously doomed relationship without awareness of the consequences, both for themselves and for others. It’s easy to forget that Romeo and Juliet were young teenagers in their story, at that histrionic age where couples are one day professing to love each other like no people have ever loved before, only to break up the following week when Juliet catches Romeo making out with another girl at the homecoming dance.

Even in the original Mirza Sahiban, the two childhood companions don’t fall in love until adolescence, the age at which they are first able to experience feelings of sexual attraction. By contrast, Munish and Suchitra are separated at the age of nine, before they have the physical capacity to experience those feelings for one another. Yet, as soon as they meet as adults, they fall into a romantic attraction, despite having only previously had a platonic childhood relationship.

This raises an important question of whether the triumph of destiny is always the most satisfying outcome when it comes to storytelling. Why does destiny necessarily trump experience? Before her fateful reunion with Munish, Suchitra is totally in love with Karan, who seems like a nice guy. They are attracted to one another and enjoy each others company. This isn’t a forced marriage.

There’s also no sense that Suchitra is pining for Munish. Had she never met him, it seems likely she would have married Karan and lived happily ever after with him in his gigantic palace. Would that have perhaps been the more interesting outcome: one member of a fated pair taking action to end a deadly reincarnation cycle, allowing them and their families to live in peace?

Gulzar’s retelling of the myth doesn’t give a compelling reason why Suchitra should be with Munish. Then again, the characters are hardly more than archetypes, so it’s difficult to ascribe motivations to any of them beyond carrying out their expected roles. Light character development also makes it hard to get much sense of Kher’s or Kapoor’s potential, both of them acting in their Hindi film debuts.

Despite all that, there are reasons why stories of doomed love endure, and Mirzya is about as beautiful to look at and listen to as can be. A familiar story allows the audience to enjoy other elements of the film, even at the expense of the plot.

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