GHAJINI

10 reasons why Ghajini deserves to be the biggest blockbuster of Hindi cinema:

10) 177 MINUTES: That’s how long it is. So straightaway, you know you’ve got your money’s worth.

9) 200 BEEFY SOUTH INDIAN MEN: I didn’t start counting from the beginning of the film, so that’s just a conservative estimate. All of them are tall, dark, oily and unshaven, with piercing black eyes. Each one gets battered to pulp by Aamir Khan.

8) SHORT TERM MEMORY LOSS: Both the director and the editor have this peculiar ailment. Just when you think the story’s moving ahead, they go back to square one and start all over again. Take it from the top, in slow-motion.

7) THERE WILL BE BLOOD: This truly is a revolutionary film (no pun intended). There’s such breathtaking gratuitous violence, it opens your eyes to the pleasures of killing people for a sport. Never again will I baulk at the sight of blood. Move over 300 and Gladiator, Ghajini is here.

6) THE VILLAIN: That’s Ghajini. Although I still don’t know what the name means. The way Pradeep Rawat plays him, he’s the embodiment of all the B-movie villains of the 1980s and 1990s – gold chains and bracelets, kohled eyes, gnarling teeth, five ugly cronies and of course, a will to kill. But in Ghajini, he’s also the owner of a large pharmaceutical company who gets invited by medical colleges as chief guest for their annual day functions. Go figure.

5) THE MUSIC: To be fair to Oscar award-winning composer A R Rahman, I watched all the songs in fast-forward mode (ah, the pleasures of home viewing). You should try doing this. It might just fool you into thinking the film has a fluid narrative.

4) THE GUY WHO PLAYS COP: Why did they kill him so early in the film? He’s this really handsome man with a Hanuman-like pout, tight jeans that sit nicely on his stomach and stiff, toned muscles bulging out of his blue shirt. Did Aamir Khan feel threatened because he’s a foot taller than him? Or was his death imminent to the plot? Either way, they bumped him off just when I was rolling on the floor watching him chase Mr Khan to his Hiranandani flat.

3) ASIN’S ACCENT: Not since Sridevi disappeared from the screen have I seen such an authentic South Indian accent in a Hindi film. She even tries to imitate Sri’s impish laugh (remember Chandni?). Oh, and did I mention both she and Jiah Khan, the other girl with a funny accent, are half Mr Khan’s age and hence perfectly suited to play his love interest. BTW, this is probably part of the collective memory loss syndrome, but the character Mr Khan plays on screen is apparently born in 1975.

2) AAMIR KHAN’S GROWL: Actually, to give Mr Khan his due, he doesn’t hog all the growls in the film. Everyone gets his/her fair share. But he has the growling glory moment when he first takes his t-shirt off before the mirror, feels up his entire tattoo-littered eight-pack upper torso and growls, grunts and jumps around in a mad rage. I suppose looking at your own reflection can induce such extreme feelings.

1) NO THANKS TO MEMENTO: Most of all, Ghajini deserves a huge round of applause for not acknowledging Christopher Nolan’s Memento as its source material. Generally, we don’t do such things in Bollywood, because when we remake Hollywood films (or remakes of Tamil remakes of Hollywood films), as a rule, we mutilate them beyond recognition. In this case, there really wasn’t a case of copyright infringement, because hey, we merely borrowed the idea of a guy who suffers from short-term memory loss, believes he needs to kill someone to avenge his lover’s death, tattoos notes to himself all over his body and takes pictures of people to remember them.

I mean there could be hundreds of films with such a premise, couldn’t there?

Deepa Deosthalee

Revolutionary Road: Where Life Stands Still

“Knowing what you’ve got, knowing what you need, knowing what you can do without –- that’s inventory control." –- Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road.

Revolutionary Road, based on a popular 1961 novel by Richard Yates, is set in America of the mid-1950s. The period is important in a certain sense. And then again, it’s not. What gives Sam Mendes’ suburban nightmare a universal quality (far more than his earlier American Beauty) is that it sort of typifies most marriages anywhere in the world. Two people often come together with the notion that they nurse common dreams, which could become the basis of building a life together, different from scores of others. But it’s entirely impractical, nay, totally impossible for this belief to actually last a lifetime. What does happen, more often than not, is what Frank and April Wheeler play out on screen. They stop listening, hit each other where it hurts most (for, living together actually opens out all their warts and weaknesses), and foist their bitterness and misgivings about their own failures upon one another, so that even inane conversations become potentially explosive situations. But the tragedy cuts deeper because Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet make such a handsome, electrifying couple, it’s depressing to watch them tear each other to shreds in scene after scene. This isn’t the romantic reunion their Titanic fans would’ve wanted. They’re so merciless you want to beg them to stop. Although anyone who’s been married long enough should know that they just wouldn’t listen, because that’s what marriage does to the best of people. It sort of dehumanizes them by putting their individual personalities in a box and forcing them to pretend that the act of coming together wiped out much of what was distinctive about them, in an irrevocable way.

That Frank and April live in the conformist ‘50s, contextualizes their despair – he’s trapped in the same mechanical job his father had done 20 years earlier in a company that makes adding machines, she, in playing suburban housewife and mother of two when her spirit longs to be elsewhere. You can watch the film twice, as one critic suggests – from either character’s point of view. Both, unfortunately, are equally valid. Neither knows what they really want, except that the life they’re leading is as far from the one they’d envisioned when they first met at a New York party, as possible. Mendes doesn’t dwell on their romance at all, cutting straight to their pretty white house with a prim, manicured lawn on a street ironically named Revolutionary Road, which was meant to be a temporary abode, except that two children and a humdrum existence tied them all up in knots. The hope of escape comes in the form of April’s naïvely romantic suggestion that they move to Paris and start afresh. Frank doesn’t really comprehend what this means for him (she plans to get a secretarial job and leave him all the time he needs to ‘find himself’) but decides to play along simply to escape the boredom of the existing predicament that’s punctuated by a listless affair with an office secretary. When he’s explaining the idea to friends and colleagues he seems to be convincing himself, more than reassuring them that it’s a brilliant and workable solution. They, in turn, are skeptical, yet envious.

The only person who actually thinks they’re doing the right thing is their realtor’s (Kathy Bates) insane son John Givings (a brilliant Michael Shannon) who was once a mathematical genius but is now confined to an institution where he’s undergone extensive shock therapy. He is nervous and fidgety, but the only problem he really seems to be suffering from is extreme truthfulness in a time and age where propriety mattered more. As April screams in an emotionally charged moment, “No one forgets the truth. They just get better at lying.” But by the time John comes to their house on a second visit, things have changed dramatically. Frank gets a lucrative promotion and April gets pregnant in that brief rekindling of their relationship with the promise of change, so that suddenly, Paris becomes a distant dream all over again.

Justin Haythes’ screenplay reflects Frank and April’s story on those around them very effectively – particularly their equally discontented neighbours who choose to sink back into their delusional life than confront their fears. But he keeps the Wheeler kids firmly in the background, which is a mistake – children exacerbate the marital tragedy, and it’s their presence which often fuels the necessity of building the illusion of a ‘stable family’. Cinematographer Roger Deakins creates an accurate sense of the boredom of prosperity, with squaky clean, colour co-ordinated compositions and Thomas Newman’s music punctuates the tension with a false sense of calm. But it is the lead pair that lends this film its emotional edge. If DiCaprio’s boyish looks heighten the frustration of a man staring at an empty life ahead, Winslet’s slightly wrinkled brow and taut face can scarcely mask the anxiety lurking under her pleasant demeanour. Their final scene together is a study in desolation – no two people sitting so close at an ordinary breakfast table could be as far apart. At the end of a lifetime together, they’d have turned their disappointment into a sport in the fashion of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

The tragedy of Revolutionary Road is that most people would watch it with a mild sense of detachment. At a time when the world as we know it is falling apart in the wake of financial doom, perhaps its time to look inwards, throw caution to the wind, and embark on a journey to rediscover who we really are. As John surmises, “Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.” And even more perhaps, to move on from there….

Deepa Deosthalee