Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Kidnap Review

Kidnap Review


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Kidnap

Anupama Chopra, Consulting Editor, Films

The world's richest man's daughter gets kidnapped. So what does he do? Among other things, he says: "Maine apne assistant ko bola hai ki mere dushmano ki list bana le". This is only one of the many spectacularly dim-witted moments in Sanjay Ghadvi's thriller Kidnap.

My other favourite is a scene in which Sonia, played by Minissha Lamba, tells her kidnaper Kabir, played by Imran Khan, that she really needs a bath. They don't have enough water so he takes her to the beach where she proceeds to do a sensuous dance in a transparent white tunic and sings, and I'm not kidding here, a song that goes: Mausam yeh awesome bada.

Of course, despite being in captivity, Sonia has a ready wardrobe of skimpy clothes just right for these special occasions.

Shibani Bhatija's script, about a young man who seeks revenge on a rich businessman by kidnapping his daughter, probably sounded good on paper. On screen, it is undiluted comedy. Ghadvi starts smartly setting up the back-story in the title sequence itself but then we cut straight to an item song which, I assume, was supposed to establish how carefree and cool Sonia is.

More than anything, she's miscast. Minissha is supposed to be 17 years old year and if that isn't enough of a howler, her mother is played by Vidya Malvade, who looks more like her older sister. What's worse is that Malvade spends most of the screen time trying to out-do Minissha with carefully arranged glimpses of cleavage. She seems barely traumatised by her daughter's kidnapping though we are told that she is coping by visiting the Siddhi Vinayak Temple.

For reasons that are never quite clear, the parents divorced when Sonia was a child. But they are forced to re-unite when their daughter is kidnapped and instead of a ransom, the kidnapper only demands that the father,
Vikrant Raina, played by a paunchy Sanjay Dutt, perform a series of tasks. Raina is an Indian Bill Gates. He is the world's richest man with a net worth of 51.7 billion dollars but the press or police never get a whiff of his actions even when he is stealing a bag of money or helping a prisoner escape by, believe it or not, disguising himself as a fireman. What can actors do with material like this?

Dutt looks bored. Imran scowls and tries to bring conviction to his role but the silliness of this enterprise is insurmountable.

See Kidnap only if, after Jaane Tu ya Jaane Na, you need to get another Imran fix. Or if you want a good laugh!

Ramchand Pakistani Review

Ramchand Pakistani



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Anupama Chopra, Consulting Editor, Films

At one point in Ramchand Pakistani, Shankar, a poor Dalit farmer from Pakistan, who is rotting in an Indian jail because he inadvertently followed his son Ramchand into India, furiously tells his son that its all his fault.

The eight-year-old boy looks shattered and slowly his eyes brim with tears. It's moments like these that stay with you even when debutant director Mehreen Jabbar's film becomes a ponderous test of patience. Working from a true-life incident, Mehreen tells the story of a loving family that falls apart when the defiant boy has an innocuous quarrel with his mother and storms off. He unknowingly crosses the India-Pakistan border. His father follows him. Both are arrested and spend the next five years in jail.

Ramchand Pakistani underlines the human cost of geopolitics. When an Indian policeman asks Shankar if he has read the news about their respective armies amassing at the border, the farmer says no. His concerns are more basic: his son who refuses to go to school, his wife who loves surma and the 50,000 rupees loan he has taken.

And yet, the long and bloody history of the two countries, keep Shankar and Ramchand in prison. Of course the irony is that being a low-cast Hindu, Shankar is at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy in Pakistan. This story is rich in emotion and drama. Jabbar's heart is in the right place and her intentions are noble.

But in cinema, that is never enough. The telling of this tale is crushingly slow and often clumsy. Mehreen, working from a screenplay by her father and producer Javed Jabbar, sets up the tragedy skillfully but then, for far too long, the story stays still.

The writing is thin and the characters in the Indian jail aren't engaging enough to sustain the scenes. Soon enough, the parallel track of Ramchand's long-suffering mother, played by Nandita Das, also starts to sputter.
Thankfully, the bumpy narrative tracks converge into a predictable but immensely moving climax. The actors, Fazal Hussain playing Ramchand and Rashid Farooqui, playing his father, are very good. They give the film an emotional heft.

See Ramchand Pakistani for their performances. But be prepared to be patient.