India Masala
Bollywood and culture in an emerging India
7 Khoon Maaf: Enticing premise, lacklustre execution
The basic premise of Vishal Bhardwaj’s enticingly titled “7 Khoon Maaf” is enough to generate excitement about the film. A woman marrying several times and killing off each of her husbands is the kind of story you don’t get to see too often in Bollywood, and if anyone can do justice to that kind of a dark theme, it has to be Bhardwaj. There wasn’t much that could go wrong with this one.
That’s exactly what I thought when I entered the theatre, more than seven months ago, to watch a movie called “Raavan“. And we all know what happened with that one. I might be accused of being a little harsh here but this film might be Vishal Bhardwaj’s “Raavan”.
In what is his weakest film yet, Bhardwaj takes the tantalising prospect of a “black widow”, and turns it into a haphazard story of a woman who seems to have a fetish for murdering her husbands, even when just leaving them would have been enough.
Priyanka Chopra plays Susanna Marie Johannes, going from a coy-20 something to a crazy-50 something during the film. As she tells one of her husbands, there’s no worse accident than marriage in a woman’s life. But she herself suffers that accident several times and when her husbands don’t turn out to be what she thought they would, she kills them off without batting an eyelid, and flits to the next one within the blink of an eye.
Bhardwaj skims the surface of each of the characters, and we never get a sense of the desperation, and later the madness that Susanna’s character should have displayed to be capable of multiple murders. In the end, you don’t feel for her character or any of the men she killed.
There is not much action and the murders get repetitive, especially because you know they are all going to die in the end. In fact, the last one seems hurriedly inserted just to make up the right number. Of the performances, Priyanka Chopra tries her best to be Susanna, but is hampered by a lacklustre script and even worse make-up. Her face in the last few scenes looks like a wall with peeling paint. That is not how women look in ther 50s. Vivaan Shah, as her admirer is restrained and does his part well.
What is it with some of our best directors making such duds these days? There was Mani Ratnam, Ashutosh Gowariker and now Vishal Bhardwaj — the latter being someone who has always delivered brilliance in almost all aspects of storytelling. We should perhaps overlook this one as a weak link in an otherwise great career and move on. ‘Ek film maaf’.
What’s in a name? The truth about “Kaminey”
When a friend went to buy movie tickets for Vishal Bhardwaj’s “Kaminey”, she felt uncomfortable.
She had never before used the word — Hindi slang for ‘scoundrels’ — and was embarrassed to utter it at the ticket counter.
The film, set in Mumbai streets, is a crime thriller about petty desires that turn two brothers against each other.
Director Bhardwaj says the title, though unusual, is apt. He went ahead with “Kaminey” after his mentor, filmmaker and lyricist Gulzar, approved it.
Bhardwaj, speaking during a panel discussion at the Osian’s-Cinefan Film Festival in New Delhi, revealed that he took inspiration for the title from Gulzar’s “Ijaazat“.
In a scene from the 1987 classic, actor Naseeruddin Shah uses the word as a term of endearment for his wife (Rekha) after she makes a cup of tea for him.
Bhardwaj said this usage of “kaminey” as a romantic expression stuck in his subconscious and changed his perception of the word as used in everyday language.
I guess it is more about the commercial freedom rather than creative freedom that gets such slang words and other not-so-creative stuff into Bollywood movies. With a majority of movies flopping, the movie-makers resort to such populist techniques. Kaminey is as creative as Choli Ke Peeche number
Kaminey: The director is the real star
Sometimes you get the best insights from the most unexpected sources. Like my mother for instance — she isn’t much of a movie person but asked me how “Kaminey” was.
“Is it like ‘Omkara’? Because I didn’t like that movie at all at first, but now that I think about it, I think it’s a great film,” she said.
And that’s when it struck me. It’s the same thing with “Kaminey“, except that you don’t dislike the movie at first watch. You just realise how brilliant it is a few hours after you’ve watched the film and then ruminate over it.
On the face of it, director Vishal Bhardwaj gives you a fast-paced, thrilling caper film littered with twists at every turn. So gripping are the happenings on screen that it’s only later you have time to marvel at the director’s attention to detail, his mastery over the craft and also the immense skill it must have taken to shoot a film like this in real time locations.
In what can be termed a highly unconventional double role (especially by Bollywood standards) Shahid Kapur plays Guddu and Charlie, twins whose life philosophies are so different they hate the sight of each other.
Guddu is the “decent” one, getting an education while working at an NGO. Charlie, on the other hand, is a gambler who hedges bets at the race track and lives life on the edge.
Guddu is in love with Sweety Bhope (Priyanka Chopra), who discovers she is pregnant. (Watch out for this scene, especially because it comes at the end of a song where Guddu is preaching safe sex to sex workers).
Kaminey rocks!!! Fantastic performances, the screenplay has such details and nuances that only Vishal Bharadwaj could have brought to it…the music is awesome too. I think it’s one of the best movies of this decade easily. Smartly and sleekly made– it really involves you, from the start and the dark humour at certain points is so brilliant. I think any perceptive, thinking person would see what a gem of a movie it is….love it!
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The Wall
Maybe too much money and too much pressure to deliver blockbuster hits is what is driving even the ‘good’ directors to creative failures.