19 | June | 2012 | MADRAS INK.

It is never easy to make a film where one of the characters actually gets to say ”I just stole Sachin’s Ferrari.”

And this – the fact that the makers set it up for their conscientious lower middle class protagonist to actually get his hands on the Little Master’s dream machine – is the part of the ride that’s thoroughly entertaining and almost plausible.

At a basic emotional level, this is essentially a story of two fathers. One who stopped his son from chasing his dream of being a cricketer owing to his history with the game and that son who grew up into a caring, loving father who wouldn’t think twice before breaking the family piggy bank to buy his son the bat he fancies. Even if the real need is for better shoes than a bat he can borrow for the match.

At a more social level, this is the story of contemporary India where the gap between the haves and the have nots has increased so much that it takes a miracle for the lower middle class to afford the quality of training that is priced for the rich.

It’s a modern day fairy tale and treated like one as the writers (story is by Rajesh Mapuskar and Raju Hirani, dialogues by Raju Hirani and the Screenplay is credited to Rajesh Mapuskar and Vidhu Vinod Chopra) manage tosuspend our disbelief for most of the superbly executed set-up.

It’s post interval that the film descends into excessive manipulative melodrama with plot contrivances guaranteed to make you roll your eyes and grind your teeth. While the film makes us root for the father forced to ”borrow” the Ferrari, it frustrates us by making him do the silliest things – the equivalent of the blonde girl following the noise in a horror film instead of running away from it. We stop relating to a film where all characters suddenly decide to behave like idiots just so that the makers can milk them for melodrama.

And there’s the unwarranted media circus and a meandering comedic subplot involving the father-son dynamic between a local gangster turned politician and his groom-to-be son that slows down the ride further.

Ferrari Ki Sawaari bears the brand of feel good drama that we have come to expect from Hirani and Vinod Chopra and debutant Rajesh Mapuskar crafts some genuinely heartwarming moments in the first half and towards the very end, extracting finely nuanced performances from the entire ensemble.

Sharman Joshi excels in this author-backed role (though his fake eyebrows are a little distracting) while Boman Irani as the bitter old man delivers his best, most refined performance. The kid Ritwik Sahore is a natural and wins you over instantly while Paresh Rawal shows us his range in a cameo. The rest of the supporting cast comprising of lesser known actors bring in the laughs too.

As entertaining as they may be, this Ferrari would’ve coasted along fine had the two-seater not been this populated. Like in the film, it runs out of petrol soon enough only to be dragged on by a bullock cart of a narrative.

Genre: Drama

Director: Rajesh Mapuskar

Cast: Sharman Joshi, Boman Irani, Ritwik Sahore, Paresh Rawal

Storyline: The head clerk of an RTO needs to beg, borrow or steal Sachin’s Ferrari to fund his son’s cricket training camp at Lords

Bottomline: Partly superlative, mostly manipulative

This review originally appeared here.

Six years ago, the country discovered an honest voice in Dibakar Banerjee with Khosla Ka Ghosla when an unlikely bunch of ordinary middle class people took on an all-powerful land-grabbing mafia to reclaim their plot.

The plot is no different here. It just got bigger. Replace Khosla’s Ghosla with Bharatnagar (a microcosm for India of course) and the land-grabbing mafia with the State-sponsored International Business Park (IBP) and what you get is the uncompromising, taut remake of Z, the 1966 novel by Greek writer Vassilis Vassilikos, that sits perfectly fine in a modern Indian context.

Shanghai is the story of a country where high-rise business parks backed by capitalists are replacing poor housing colonies and any voice of dissent is silenced by the State itself. This is a world run by the morally bankrupt. One where idealists are maligned with scams and duty conscious government bureaucrats wrestle with conscience before passing every file.

Dibakar presents us with some of the most interesting characters we have seen onscreen in recent times. A videographer who sometimes shoots porn (Emraan Hashmi), a Tamil IAS officer who considers taking on a lucrative foreign assignment to close down a case (Abhay Deol) and a social activist and professor with a weakness for falling in love with his students (Prosenjit Chatterjee). The support cast is terrific too. Pitobash, Farooque Shaikh making a comeback and Kalki Koechlin get author-backed parts written to their strengths.

But instead of letting the text tell the story, the filmmaker decides to let the visuals do all the talking. The dialogue, though sharp, is just incidental as the director chooses to enrich the narrative with every faculty available to him. Actors are cast against the grain (a little too against the tide for Abhay Deol playing a Tamilian), the production design is rich with detail and nuance, the rare background score knows when to drown everything (and when to shut up) and then, there are the stray elements of chaos that creep into the frame to remind you of the country we live in. Be it the stray football entering an official government enquiry, the slippery wet floors or the taps without water. Very rarely do we come across films where even the locations are telling us more about the state of affairs than the dialogue itself.

Cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis takes us through this maze for justice with his painstakingly crafted long takes while the writers of Shanghai, Dibakar Banerjee and Urmi Juvekar, backed by the editor Namrata Rao, seem confident enough to let the pieces of the jigsaw unfold little by little, and surprise us every few minutes in this tight thriller with a runtime of less than two hours.

The songs by Vishal and Shekhar are sneaked in rather nicely strictly for the set-up and even the ‘item song’ has everything to do with the plot.

With not a single dull moment and every department in fine form, this is tour de force filmmaking. Simply one of the best and bravest films you will see this year.

Genre: Political Thriller

Director: Dibakar Banerjee

Cast: Abhay Deol, Emraan Hashmi, Kalki Koechlin, Prosenjit Chatterjee, Farooque Shaikh, Tillotama Shome, Pitobash

Storyline: As a social activist lies in coma for taking a stand against the State’s decision to build a business park by taking over a housing colony, the quest for justice begins

Bottomline: That rare, almost uncompromising political thriller where the subtext and the context are more significant than the text itself. One where the visuals speak louder than words.

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Archive For June 19th, 2012

Ferrari Ki Sawaari: Bumpy Emotional Rollercoaster

Shanghai: When The Plot Became Thicker