Badlapur Review ... Bollywood movie of the year 2015

While seeking revenge, dig two graves - one for yourself.
                                                      ~ Douglas Horton

I have been meaning to review Badlapur for quite a while now, but couldn't get my lazy ass to do it. Finally with nothing better to do, I decided to give it a shot. Badla (Revenge) is one of the most basic of human urges like love, lust and jealousy. Everybody has felt that urge at least once in their lives. But most of us think of revenge in the heat of the moment, thankfully not many of us have the nerve or tenacity to plan & execute revenge. Often the thing that keeps us from exacting revenge is life itself, we get busy with living & learn to forgive & forget. But what if everything you live for is snatched away from you in an instant, what would you do? 

1. End your life
2. Live for the sole purpose of exacting revenge on the person(s) who ruined your life 
3. Or do you live & learn to forgive & forget.

Badlapur is the story of a man who chooses to live the 2nd option. But unlike most films on this theme, Badlapur is as much about the antagonist as it is about the protagonist. I was careful not to choose the word villain & hero in the previous sentence, because in my opinion the movie had neither in the conventional sense. 

Raghu, played by Varun Dhawan is a young man with a beautiful wife and cute little son, living a seemingly happy life. But his life gets upturned one day by 2 bank robbers who kidnap his wife & son & hijack their car to flee from the scene of crime. During the escape the kid falls from the car in a freak accident and in the ensuing scuffle between the robbers & Raghu's wife, she gets shot accidentally by one of them. One of the robbers, Layak (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) then asks his partner Harman (Vinay Pathak) to jump from the running car and run away with the loot. Layak gives himself up to the police and tells them that his partner masterminded the crime and killed the lady. He is innocent as he was just driving the car. 
When Raghu reaches the hospital he finds his son dead & his wife breathing her last. In the days following the crime the police Inspector in charge, played by Kumud Mishra tries hard to beat a confession out of Layak & force him to give up the whereabouts of his partner. He is unable to do either. Raghu hires a lady private investigator to find out more about Layak. She finds out that Layak has a mother who runs a tea stall and a girlfriend named Jhimli (Huma Qureshi) who is a prostitute. Raghu visits Jhimli and entices her with a lot of money if she can find out about Layak's partner. Jhimli doesn't take the bait as she believes Layak is innocent. Raghu finds himself helpless and wanting even as the court sentences Layak to life imprisonment.
Raghu wanders the streets aimlessly for a bit, his state of mind is beautifully captured by Arijit Singh & Rekha Bharadwaj in the song Judaai. He then completely drops off the grid, takes up residence in a small town outside Mumbai called Badlapur waiting for Layak to get out of prison.

All this happens in the first 30 minutes of the movie. The next 40 minutes or so belong to the inimitable Nawazuddin Siddiqui. This movie wouldn't have been half as good without Nawaz in it. Nawaz hit the right balance between charming & creepy that made his character much more interesting that any other in the film. I will leave out the rest of the story for all those who haven't yet seen the movie. The story takes many winding twists & turns from this point on with Raghu & Layak each trying to better the other. While Layak tries different ways to get out of prison and run away with his share of the loot which his friend is still holding for him; Raghu plans to stop him in his efforts and find out the whereabouts of Layak's partner, who he believes is his wife & son's killer. Both Raghu & Layak have their lives consumed by a single purpose, often seesawing between desperation & frustration. As the story unfolds you come to realize that each of them is living in his own hell, unable to break free. The boundaries between good & evil are blurred and you find yourself questioning who is the villain here? In the end the movie is about two lives destroyed, one by revenge and another by greed. There is some redemption though, but you will have to watch the movie to find out for whom. 

The director was able to capture the lingering meaninglessness of the lives of both the characters in a subtle and non intrusive way. There was a conscious effort by the director to mask some of the more intricate scenes in the movie with light humor. The most notable of them was a fake sex scene between Raghu & Koko (Radhika Apte). Another great feature of this movie was its handling of the subject of lust. It can be difficult to grasp the importance of this topic when you watch the movie for the first time, but I was able to understand this better on my 2nd viewing. When a man looks permanently distraught from the loss of his wife & child, it is easy to think of him as bereft of love & happiness, but the director reminds us, twice, that he is also a man of flesh & blood driven by lust but torn between the need for gratification & the guilt associated with it.

The acting was generally good and the casting I will say was near perfect except for Varun Dhawan. Varun Dhawan tried his best although his emotions or lack of it was often overshadowed by his beard. Kumud Mishra, Radhika Apte, Huma Qureshi & Divya Dutta all did justice to their roles. But Nawazuddin Siddique took the cake with his effortless performance. I especially liked the chemistry between Nawaz & Huma, reminded me of Gangs of Wasseypur.

2015 was a disappointing year for Bollywood in my opinion. Detective Byomkesh Bakshy & NH 10 are probably the only other 2 noteworthy movies of the year. I was disappointed by Bombay Velvet, although not as much as most people, and I frankly didn't understand what the hell Piku was about. Badlapur was the movie of the year for me, I am waiting eagerly for Sriram Raghavan's next.

Review - Anurag Kashyap's Ugly

When you wait for nearly 2 years to watch a movie, you want it to be good, reeeaallly good. You almost want to be swept off your feet by the movie. Ugly was 1 such movie, its release was delayed due to a protracted and some would say unnecessary battle between Anurag Kashyap and the Censor Board. When it finally was released thousands of AK fans rushed to the theatres to watch it with huge expectations in their minds. I was one of them. I was not disappointed, but I wasn't swept off my feet either. It felt more like I was hit hard on the back of the head. And then I realized my expectations were wrong. I was waiting for an Anurag Kashyap movie not a Christopher Nolan one. How could I expect to be swept off my feet? Anurag Kashyap has delivered one of the most dark and disturbing movies I have seen in recent times. In a way he has gone back to his basics. The feeling I got after I walked out of the theater was quite similar to what I felt after watching Boys Don't Cry and Revolutionary Road. The film true to its name is an ensemble of some of the most selfish and wicked characters you can find. But unlike the rich and powerful mob bosses or politicians we are used to watching as villains in most Bolywood movies, the characters here are common people, even the cops in the movie seem all too familiar, not unusually wicked or corrupted but abrasive enough in their behaviour to make you want to stay away.

There is a police station scene towards the beginning of the movie. A man whose daughter went missing has gone to the police station with his friend to lodge a missing persons complaint. The cops there are more interested in knowing how to save a picture as a caller id in the mobile than to look for his daughter. And the hapless father sees that his only option to get them to move on with the investigation is to show the damn inspector how to do it. I guess many of us would have faced similar indifference from the police. And that's the beauty of the scene. In an otherwise grim movie this scene provides comic reprieve but as the scene moves along you start feeling that this is real life, this is how most police stations work in India. And its then amidst the humour that you start feeling for the father and the missing child. The scene its said was planned for just 1.5 mins but it dragged on to more than 10 mins as the actors kept improvising. Anurag Kashyap is one director who doesn't stay bound to his script. He goes by his gut feel.

The story in one line is about the search for a missing child. But the movie is more about the characters than the plot itself. There are lots of characters all with their hidden crooked agenda behind the case. There is an alcoholic mother, a struggling actor for the father, a strict and honest but regressive senior cop who spies on his wife, a casting director who is the father's friend and financer and many more. And some of the characters are related to each other by some twisted connections and circumstances that makes the whole ensemble look like a spider's web. The plot has lots of twists and turns giving the feel of a whodunnit, but the truth when it surfaces paints a sorry picture of human nature. Anurag Kashyap has the knack for looking into the dark recesses of human nature and dig out pessimistic stories from there. In that regard Ugly is probably his most pessimistic.

Moving on. I will remember this movie more for its music and some scenes in particular than anything else. The background score composed by Brian McOmber totally gels with the plot and theme of the movie. 2 songs in particular are stuck in my memory - Money by Christopher Stanley I think was composed for this movie. and the other One day baby we'll be old by Asaf Avidan an the Mojos an Israeli rock band. AK has some taste in music !!

Talking about the memorable scenes, I have already mentioned one.

• In the 2nd one there is a dark quarter in a police colony in Mumbai where the police has kept Rahul Bhatt, father of the missing girl who is also a suspect in the case, locked up. A dotor accompanied by a policeman comes to the quarter to check him, to see if he was fit enough to be produced in court without the court raising questions over police brutality. When the guys enter the quarter, we see a dark room with just a 15 W bulb glowing, while the policeman proceeds to open another door that leads into a 2nd room, the doctor keeps staring at the camera, a look of shock in his eyes. They enter the room where the father is locked up, there is a scuffle there and Rahul Bhatt frees himself, takes the cop's gun, ties both the cop and the doctor up and takes off. But again while he is leaving he can't but stare at the camera again with a shocking expression. And then the camera moves around to show the audience what the actors were staring at. I just loved the way this scene was shot.
• The 3rd one is in the police lockup. The police has locked up Chaitanya, Rahul's friend and manager who is their 2nd suspect in the kidnapping. They have tried their best to beat him into confessing but it hasn't worked. Then they ask Rahul to confront his friend and get him to blurt out the truth. Chaitanya of course is not a saint, he has been lying to the police but its not entirely clear whether he is behind the kidnapping. When Rahul starts asking him some difficult questions, raising suspicions over his actions, Chaitanya launches into a tirade full of expletives against his friend. In this 2-3 mins scene I didn't count how many times he uses the word "bh****ke" and "ma*****od" but let me assure you it was plenty, almost 1 after every 2-3 other words. The interesting thing is till then, we haven't seen Chaitanya utter these 2 swear words at all, he doesn't look like a habitually abusive person. It captures beautifully how some people react when they are caught in an uncomfortable argument. They try to bully their way out of it. On the one hand Chaitanya is trying to counter every accusation his friend is making with a proper reason and on the other hand he is showing his disappointment in his ungrateful friend by abusing him, all the while shouting and swearing to force a quick end to the conversation.

Ugly's cinematography by Nikos Andritsakis is brilliant. Nikos has worked with Dibakar Bannerjee in Shanghai and LSD before. Through his camera he has made the dark look beautiful. The stand out actor in the movie was Girish Kulkarni, a National Award winning Marathi actor who plays a cop. Tejaswani Kolhapure as the depressed alcoholic mother of the missing daughter is also convincing. Ronit Roy as usual is good but I am afraid he has gotten himself stereotyped in Bollywood from where he will find it hard to come out. I was not convinced by Rahul Bhatt's acting who played the girl's father. I heard that he used to be AK's roommate during his struggling years, maybe that's why he got the part. I was also not entirely convinced about the movie's ending, I felt it left some questions unanswered. But I will leave it to you to judge that.

Ugly is a must watch for all Anurag Kashyap fans, but whether its his best, I am not so sure. Actually I would rather not think about it.

For all those who have watched Ugly, watch this. It's a short prequel that AK made. It narrates the events leading to Kali's birth called Kali Katha. Those who haven't watched Ugly don't watch this. Watch the movie first.

And here's the song One day baby we'll be old by Asaf Avidan an the Mojos -

Haider - a short review

I intend to write a longer review of Haider, but I will wait to watch it once more at least, on DVD to write a full review. That will also allow me to discuss the plot without spoiling the movie for whoever reads the review. To put in short Haider is a gem, may even be VB's best, but I will reserve the judgement till a second viewing of the film. Vishal Bharadwaj in my opinion has been able to capture the true essence of the great Shakespearean tragedy of Hamlet. Now I am no expert on Shakespeare, but you don't need to be one to assess why Hamlet is considered as one of his more tragic, if not the most, of all his tragedies. And Haider validates that feeling, with an omni present aura of impending gloom and dread through out the movie. 15-20 minutes into the film you will start getting a feel that this story is not going to end well, and the more you watch the feeling gets worse. And that is VB's towering achievement. He was able to create that sense of doom & despair with not just the expressions on the characters' faces, but with superb cinematography and a brilliant background music. Kashmir's landscapes looked at once beautiful, dangerous and depressing through cinematographer Pankaj Kumar's (Ship of Theseus) lenses. I also came to know that the screenplay is jointly written by VB and Basharat Peer, a famed journalist who wrote the book Curfewed Night on Kashmir. Haider has several incidents from that book. The acting was superb by everyone, including Shradhha Kapoor, but Shahid Kapoor was the one who stood out. The story was about Haider's mental turmoil, and Shahid Kapoor managed to look every bit as troubled & tormented as he was supposed to be. His deterioration from an innocent and calm young boy to a delirious and dangerous man consumed with revenge was meticulously scripted and deftly portrayed by Shahid himself. Some scenes stand out - like the one where he is standing at Lal Chowk Srinagar, with his head shaven, and speaking to a moderate crowd through a megaphone - "Hello, hello 1 .. 2.. 3 mike testing, awaaz arahi hai ...". Or the one where he ponders on whether "to be or not to be (revengeful)" with a gun in his hand. The dialogues were very well written too, some of them I believe translated as is from the original play. Haider's complex relationship with his mom was also very well written as it was central to the plot. I will not discuss the story, I will leave it for later. To sum up Haider is a must watch, for connoisseurs of cinema. Go watch it if you haven't already.