HIT - The First Case [dir. Sailesh Kolanu]

It might seem like I'm doing a bait and switch with the title of the new Rajkummar Rao film, when this is actually my opinion for the Telugu original starring Vishwak Sen, which came out in 2020. But it's not just the name that is carried over. Going by the trailer of the Hindi remake, even the content of the films seems so identical that, slight differences in actors aside, I suspect you would be having a photocopy experience.

Vikram (Sen / Rao), the lead character of HIT (which stands for Homicide Investigation Team), is the investigator you have seen in a thousand modern detective shows. He ticks the columns of being (a) a brilliant but morose anti-social chap with (b) past trauma that gives him nightmares / hallucinations and (c) is is tasked with a case that has personal ramifications and threatens to burst his bubble of sanity. Vikram is so pathologically obsessed with the job he refuses to give it up even when his therapist warns him that his 'vitals' are failing, but the moment he takes a sabbatical on the insistence of his forensic scientist girlfriend Neha (Ruhani Sharma / Sanya Malhotra), she goes missing. Her disappearance seems linked with that of a young girl Preethi, who vanished one day after her car broke down on the highway. To find Neha, Vikram plunges headlong into cracking Preeti's case (for some reason, even though Neha disappears directly after digging up forensic evidence on Preeti's abduction, no one else thinks of connecting the two matters). Meanwhile he repeatedly gets stress-triggering flashbacks of a past trauma in which he is unable to save a girl being killed. I won't spoil it for you, but the reveal of the mystery calls for some serious suspension of disbelief, and characters acting in a manner that far exceeds their motivations.

Even with the cliches and contrivances, HIT has its moments of interest. Vikram gets so caught up in tracking down Neha he doesn't care about risking the lives of suspects. His superior officer (Bhanuchander / Dalip Tahil) uses him like a gifted bloodhound and indulges his eccentricities (though a botched narc test crosses even his line). There is an intriguing sequence of events early in the film showing Preeti's encounter with a disheveled cop Ibrahim (Murali Sharma / Milind Gunaji) who offers to drop her after her vehicle breakdown, and when she goes missing makes some forays towards tracking her, but a chain of circumstances lead to his ignominious suspension and the overlooking of crucial evidence till Vikram picks up on him later. At least in the Telugu version, the writing is solid in this segment and Murali Sharma's under-playing is a joy to watch. I actually wish the film had been more about this guy because...

For me, the lead character was a cold fish. I think a good deal of this has to do with Vishwak Sen's acting so perhaps the Hindi version fares better. True, Vikram is supposed be psychologically fatigued, but there is zero emotional  register in Sen's performance. Even in the writing the relationship between Vikram and Neha is a vacuum. Given that he refuses to share his past trauma with her, and doesn't seem one for cheery small talk, one wonders what apart from their work draws them together. That seems a bigger mystery than the one tackled in the film.

Cabaret aka India Cabaret [dir. Mira Nair]

"No one at home knows that I dance", says Rekha, the main face of Mira Nair's 1985 documentary Cabaret. Rekha is a veteran strip club dancer. She had been once married, but walked away when the husband started to oppress her, even "rent" her out to friends. After her parents refused to take her back, she decided to make her own life and chose the striptease as her career. Outside the club, Rekha is indistinguishable from the typical Indian middle-class hausfrau, adorned demurely in a sari and the traditional bindi as she goes about her household chores or haggles with the vegetable vendor. But when in the crowded anteroom with her co-workers she dons pancake and mascara, and the suggestive outfit that will come off in the course of her performance, she becomes the night's wet dream for the roomful of men around her.

Cabaret has a special resonance for me. In the 80's when I was a kid, there was a restaurant-bar  called Meghraj a stone's throw from my place; many a weekend, we would head there for family dinners. The main restaurant, a well-lighted family-friendly place with (as I recall) teal and white interiors, was on the ground floor. But a set of stairs led to another floor, whence came the sound of music from behind closed doors. While I never had the opportunity to verify, it was known to be a strip bar. Sometime just before the 90's, the place shut down amid rumors of criminal activity. It was never redeveloped as anything else, suggesting that the property remains under a cloud. 

Nair's film enters the Meghraj dance bar when it was still a flourishing concern with a regular strip show. Swaying their hips to live Western music (and trendy Bollywood numbers), the fleshy, heavily made-up dancers slowly cast aside their clothing and shimmy among the clientele, encouraging them to buy more drinks. They walk the tightrope between exuding the come-hither attitude with their movements and expressions, yet keeping a sufficient barrier for their own safety from the not always happy-to-just-stare men. They receive propositions for private encounters that ask for more than dancing; on camera the proprietor declares that he plays no role in such affairs, whether they accept or not is up to the individual women.

Some of the customers are also interviewed: They acknowledge that they enjoy watching the women drop their clothes, and assert that those who protest the loudest are in secret the biggest patrons. One of them says, "Men want to do whatever their heart pleases, but they want their own family women to be Sati-Savitris [pious]" When asked what sort of woman he would prefer to marry, he responds with a grin, "Of course, a Sati-Savitri."

Nair also explores the daytime lives of the women. Some live together in cramped rooms and the neighbors can be unduly curious, even hostile. They are shown as homely people who want to just peacefully get along in society, and to make enough money to better their lives and of their families, many of whom are not aware of their profession. One of them argues that this line is better than being a secretary somewhere because a girl makes far less money in an office and gets groped even there. Some like Rekha are smart enough to buy property and invest their earnings while the going is good, because they know theirs is not a long-term career. Rekha is also interesting in terms of being an independent strong-minded woman that will marry only on her own terms, not out of gratitude to some savior. Towards the end of the docu, she agrees to marry a suitor she has kept hanging for years on end to test the loyalty of his affections.

The film also enters the home of one of the regular customers, a Gujarati businessman with an extended family. His wife with a wry smile deplores her husband's habit of staying long hours in the dance bars, while she must look after his family; he laughs her off patronizingly. Nair and editor Barry Alexander Brown (who later worked for Spike Lee) splice together an interesting mirroring between this 'respectable' housewife discussing her mentally imprisoned state and Rekha's more empowered stance.

The tone of Cabaret is inquisitive, but not sordid. In Rekha's amicable parting of ways with the profession, it ends with an admiring salute to the spirit of at least those women who have learned to survive the ups and downs of the profession and manage to retain control of their self-worth.

The complete documentary is up on Youtube (It is also included as a bonus feature on the Criterion Blu-ray/DVD release of Monsoon Wedding and the BFI Blu-ray of Salaam Bombay!):

Visa to Canton [dir. Michael Carreras]

"The name's Benton...Don Benton." That doesn't really have the same ring, does it? 

I was regarding Visa to Canton (US title Passport to China) as a charming low-rent James Bond knockoff from from Britain's Hammer Studios till I realized it was actually made two years before the first Bond film, Dr. No. Of course, Ian Fleming's famous superspy was already 8 books old in print, after his literary birth in 1953's Casino Royale. The debut novel in turn had an Americanized TV adaptation a year later, featuring a thuggish "Jimmy Bond" (Barry Nelson); incidentally, the suave hero of Visa to Canton (VtC) is an American. 

Our hero Benton (Richard Baseheart, prefiguring Roger Moore's portrayal of 007) is a WW2 flying hero turned travel agency hotshot based in Hong Kong. Of course this being a Hammer production, all principal photography was done at their Bray Studios in Berkshire, and the few glimpses of actual Hong Kong in the film are either second unit work or stock photography. Benton is the "can do" man whose assured manner and silver tongue smooth over all obstacles. Apparently, his PR skills are so good the CIA wants to recruit him for a secret mission involving a downed aircraft on the Chinese mainland. Benton turns them down, but changes his mind once he realizes that the mission involves the rescue of a relative, in fact the pilot grandson of his adopted Chinese family (yep, you read that).

In a Bond film, this infiltration would have been a significant early action set-piece. But Michael Carreras' talent for spectacle and Hammer's budget are modest. There are no difficulties for Benton's crew in the search, and the Chinese soldiers they encounter are so inept and lackadaisical, even in a slow-moving motorized canoe, they easily escape their pursuers.

But there's more in store. The rescued pilot (Burt Kwouk) stands accused of having helped in the capture of a CIA informant who was a passenger on the downed flight. Benton decides to go into China again and find the truth to save the honor of his Chinese family. In this adventure, he comes up against lovely Lola (Lisa Gastoni), the informant who carries in her head vital information about a super-weapon, and the Russian origin smiling viper Ivano Kang (Eric Pohlmann, channeling Sydney Greenstreet from The Maltese Falcon).

These elements generate the most potent Bond-like atmosphere. Lola's sultry posing in Benton's hotel bedroom is an almost archetype Bond girl appearance. Kang's oily menace is echoed in many of Bond's supervillains and he has a notable Henchman in India-born Milton Reid (who later memorably tangled with Bond himself in The Spy Who Loved Me). Composer Edwin Astley's brassy score is a precursor to Monty Norman and John Barry's work on the Bond movies. This is not to say those films aped VtC; Fleming's novels already dictated their style. But Hammer's film did set a precedent for that spy adventure template on the screen. It even ends with a "possible next mission" coda (but not with a kiss). 

There are some now-cringy bits, like Caucasian actors done up as Chinese speaking pidgin English, but VtC is still more egalitarian than other "exotic East" movies (including Hammer's Terror of the Tongs, which had been constructed around the same time and using the same production material to share costs). At least the film does not uniformly paint Asians as slit-eyed evildoers. Benton is a grateful part of the Chinese family that sheltered him in difficult times and sees them on equal terms. The thrills are modest but the film has a likable smoothness. If VtC had more spectacle, more vim, more chutzpah, it could have made a bigger impact on audiences, perhaps even offset the dominance of Bond as cinema's premier globe trotting spy.

Mumbai Police [dir. Roshan Andrews]

2013's Mumbai Police has, up to a point, a decent mystery plot about a cop who lapses into amnesia in an accident just moments after informing a colleague that he has cracked a murder case. Now without those memories, he has to re-solve the case.

Antony 'Tony' Moses - played by Malayalam cinema's action hero Prithviraj Sukumaran - is the cop. At the beginning of the film, we see him tell someone on the phone "I've got the culprit". Moments later, a falling refrigerator from a van ahead forces him to veer and his car overturns. When Tony awakes, he has no recollection of who he is. Only his senior officer and friend Farhan (Rahman), who was on the other end of that call, is dealing with him. Farhan informs Tony that he was on the trail of the killer of their mutual friend Aryan Jacob (Jayasurya), a cop shot dead on the very stage he received a gallantry award.

Armed with only what information Farhan can share with him and his own instincts, Tony must start again at square one. In a script contrivance, Farhan asks Tony to conceal his amnesia from everyone, including their own colleagues in the force. This leads to some awkward moments for our protagonist. Also, it would seem that there are people bent on thwarting Tony's investigation, even if it means killing him.

Prithviraj is not the most versatile actor, but fits a certain badass hero / arrogant anti-hero niche. In this lead part, he gets a little more depth than the typical masala movie he is known for. A series of flashbacks makes us privy to the events prior to the amnesia loss, and we get an interesting contrast in Tony's nature before and after the accident, almost a different person in several aspects. The bulk of the film is a police procedural in which Privithraj follows up various threads - and associated red herrings - before the solution dawns upon him.

Without spoilers, the resolution of the mystery is where the film completely threw my suspension of disbelief. It makes a mockery of how amnesia affects a person's basic identity and is executed with zero sensitivity, making me want to clout the writers (credited as Bobby and Sanjay) and director that came up with this rubbish. It also relies on an offensively contrived series of circumstances that undo the - rah-rah moments notwithstanding - layered build-up of the investigation that had been depicted till that moment. Put simply, it's a lame and disappointing conclusion that leaves a bad aftertaste after a promising beginning.

RRR [dir. S Rajamouli]

It is, I suppose, a curse of the pan-India movie paradigm that even the titles must be generic for the sake of universality. So they either use proper nouns, words that mean the same across multiple Indian languages, or, as in the case of Eega wunderkid Rajamouli's latest project RRR, reduce the title to an acronym that expands differently in different tongues. That said, with RRR I wonder if the bulk of the audience is even bothered to be acquainted with the expanded forms in the different releases. It might as well be just an echo of the manly growls that permeate this picture.

And there are manly growls galore. Each of the film's two male leads - Ram Charan and NTR Jr - gets a massive introduction sequence in which they are established as forces of nature. Rajamouli distinguishes his heroes with fire and water motifs respectively, even announcing these in on-screen titles, just in case anyone in the audience missed the metaphor. The film drips with so much machismo, it was a missed marketing opportunity that they didn't have promotional 'mandles'.

While RRR is making waves both in India and outside for its exaggerated action set-pieces and equally exaggerated bromance between the lead stars, it is by no means a novel concept. Bollywood masala mogul Manmohan Desai's Mard in 1985 showcased Amitabh Bachchan and Dara Singh knocking the stuffing out of British colonials with fisticuffs and the aid of a trained horse and dog. RRR's bad people, Governor Buxton (Ray Stevenson) and his wife (Alison Doody, the only woman in the film who makes an impact), would certainly be at home with the caricature British villains from Mard. Stevenson admonishes his troops for wasting expensive British-made bullets on lowly brown natives, while Doody complains about the lack of blood spurts in a public lashing. I imagine the spirit of Bob Christo would heartily approve of these doings. For some reason they're not mindful of a niece (Olivia Morris) that hangs about with said lowly brown natives and brings them for tea and dance dates to the gubernatorial palace.

Continuing with the Mard comparisons, RRR does not match up to that film's cheerful ludicrousness. Mard had cheesy S&M leather outfits, Mission Impossible type latex mask disguises, a baddie literally bleeding out starved Indian laborers while wearing a Hammer Dracula style hooded cape. But one really can't hope for that level of reckless imagination now.

As some measure of recompense, RRR boasts of a level of polish in the execution of its set-pieces that the technologically-slipshod-even-for-the-80's Mard could not claim. An applause-worthy level of detail is given to each of the film's action sequences, which are meticulously designed and painstakingly executed - Ram Charan fighting his way back and forth through a whole mob of protesters, him and NTR Jr forming a Goro-like fighting combo, the wild animal assault on the Governor's mansion. Right up to the ridiculously explosive climax, the film speaks purely in hyperbole. There are even some epic emotional moments like when NTR's character is getting whipped by Ram and breaks out into a patriotic song - say what you will, these guys put in their all.

But anytime the film moves away from them or the baddies, it stumbles massively. Alia Bhat barely registers as Ram's love interest, and Ajay Devgan as his father sucks the life out of every scene he is in, purely by being his Ajay Devgan self. Taking them out of the picture would have cut a fourth of the massive runtime and kept it fresher.

I certainly enjoyed individual portions of RRR, but Eega / Naan Ee / Eecha / Makkhi is still the one Rajamouli film I consider worth revisiting.