Dostana

It is an ignoble insult to film art and craft. I am not sure if it has any commercial value. What about its social relevance as a gay film? You must ask a homosexual. Next, you may probably be found in some hospital with a broken and bleeding nose and black eyes .

Is it a great story? Story? What story?

Is it a bag of brand new gags that make you go wild with laughter?  Laughter! If I have to laugh, I will check out the You Tube for some really cool and irreverent Borat jokes or even one of our own laughter shows on TV. I had a funny feeling while watching the film. It sounded as if the director has used canned laughter in the sound track to tickle the funny bones of the demented among the audience who are ever ready to let off a giggle and ‘he hes’ and ‘ha has’. If that is true, it is a smart new invention in Indian cinema. Great!

The director of Dostana has brought cinema down to the level of cheap TV comedy, filled with canned laughter. Let us give him an Oscar. Has Karan Johar got the call from the Oscar librarian requesting him to send the classic script of Dostana to be entombed and immortalized?

Let us come down to the bulging biceps, the eight-pack physique, and the famed pair of buttocks of John Abraham. These are highlighted in the film with great precision. John is so eager to show them off that he walks all through the film like a chimp, and a night club bouncer with his brawny and pumped-up biceps hanging by his sides. Is he playing a photographer or a ‘Bullworker’ model in the film? This is supposed to be a comedy. What you need here is relaxed, free-flowing, and timely reflexes and responses of the muscles in your body and brain. What you get is all brawn -- taut, tense, and awkward.

Priyanka Chopra is the most relaxed of the lot and thus delivers an authentic performance within the limitations of the script. She is more of an actress than the ‘hot thing’.  The director concentrates on her emaciated ‘desi chicken’ legs, but thankfully what she does with her face is what gets noticed a little more. She is turning out to be a good actress and has gained a lot of confidence. It is not that she did not have it. She did a good job even in her first film, a Sunny Deol-starrer directed by Anil Sharma. She needs to do some well-etched out roles to reach the pinnacle of her acting glory. Meena Kumari’s role in Saheb, Bibi, and Ghulam is an ideal role for her if the film is ever helmed, and someone handles it with certain degree of cinematic sensitivity.

Abhishek Bachhan is a little more relaxed than John and thus bearable. The problem is he thinks he must do ‘comedy’ to raise laughter. You don’t ‘do comedy’ to raise a laughter buddy, you play a character to the hilt, which may raise laughter, instill fear, invoke emotions, arouse passions, and generate deep disgust. It is not that doing a film or play puts an additional responsibility on you to become funny and you have to try hard and harder to fulfill that promise by contorting your face and going over the top and falling flat.  No, no, you don’t become an actor like that. The role matters the most. Understand the role well if it is there - defined, and explained.

And who creates those roles? The writer and the director of the film do that. If they fail in this, nothing else works. However, they must understand the importance of the process – defining a role from an actor’s perspective. We call it characterisation. David Dhavan is a master of that. He too copies all Hollywood comedies lock, stock, and barrel like the makers of Dostana but he makes sure his characterizations do not go wrong. He does not depend solely on gags to make his comedy work. He knows his craft so well. 

Dasvidania

It is a proper film, which is a big deal.

There are two problems with it – 1. Its screenplay, 2. The performance of its lead actor, who is also the producer of the film, sone pe gobar.

Its screenplay is badly contrived. Ipso facto, the film’s characterizations take a severe beating as well since they follow a dishonest and predictable pattern.

It is the story of a perennial loser Amar, played by Vinay Pathak. Amar is dying and his alter ego suggests that before departing from the mortal world he should fulfill his long cherished ambitions. He prepares his list, the bucket list, the wishes to be fulfilled before he hits the bucket. These are small doable things, with a big one like ‘appearing on the front page of a newspaper’.

We have a typical Vinay Pathak, the harried, the hassled, the ‘daantniporu’, the ‘dukhi’, the ‘daridra’, the ‘cho sweet’, the ‘Bholuram’,  the ‘Raj Kapoor’, the ‘Charlie Chaplin’, and the ‘Sudama Prasad’ who keeps his ‘dukhadas’ to himself and suffers the inequities and indignities of middle class existence in silence. He is craving to be pitied by the whole world. His hairstyle, his office bag, his gait, his trousers, his shirt, his office desk, his pyjama, his banyan, his towel, his chashma, and his chadhi are all begging for extreme sympathy, ‘daya’, and ‘karuna’.

This professionally trained actor too follows Abhishek Bachhan’s histrionic technique. He ‘acts’ and fakes his character without becoming it and kills his own film with an overdose of his megalomaniacal self.

That is all to it. Dasvidaniya.

RKS