CINETALK

A huge let down

Film Dil Bole Hadippa!

Cast Rani Mukerji, Shahid Kapoor, Anupam Kher, Poonam Dhillon, Rakhi Sawant, Sheryln Chopra

Director Anuraag Singh

Somewhere down the line in this mishmash of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, Chak De and what have you, Shahid Kapoor, looking as intense as a man who has just discovered he has acute molar ache, scowls at Rani and says, “You should be an actress in films”.

Actress she is. And a highly competent one. Rani has worked really hard on getting the Sardar-ji’s act together. At times she’s quite funny and poignant. But her attempts go waste in a film that seems to move in a rudderless stupor.

Rani is sorely let down in her made-to-order vehicle by a script that’s as phony and pasted-on as the moustache she pastes on to infiltrate the all-boy’s cricket team helmed by a Britain-returned dude from a broken family.

Shahid’s dad Anupam Kher lives in Amritsar, while his mom, Poonam Dhillon, lives in London.

Backgrounds are not very high in the list of this messy and annoying mishmash about cross-dressing and sporting spirit. While Shahid’s character we know is from a broken home, only god and the scripwriter know where Rani’s character Veera/ Veer comes from.

While Hillary Swank, as a girl dressed as a guy, got the Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry, Rani misses her award-winning turn by a wide margin, thanks to a script that meanders like a bumbling bumblebee which doesn’t know who to sting.

The story of the spirited girl’s sprint into a men’s game and into the coach’s heart lacks bite and humour. The dialogues are ultra-pedestrian, some of the exchanges between the rustic Rani and the posh Shahid shamelessly taken from Jab We Met

What were the makers of this film thinking? Not much, as we can easily see in the slithering progression of the material and dismaying lack of motivation. After the interval, the wobbly narration just collapses in a tired heap, with scenes in a nautanki featuring Rakhi Sawant plunging to the bottom-most rung of mediocrity.

The climactic cricket match between India and Pakistan is as exciting as watching Kaminey with the soundtrack turned off. In Dil Bole Hadippa!, the soundtrack is so loud it drowns any finer point that the narration may possess.

Don’t waste your time looking for silver linings in this dreadful cricket film. Someone said cricket is a game played by 12 fools and watched by 12,000 fools. No we know what he meant.

Of fake art and a murder

Film Blue Oranges

Cast Rajit Kapoor, Harsh Chaya, Rati

Agnihotri, Pooja Kanwal and Aham

Sharma

Director Rajesh Ganguly

An alcoholic woman is murdered, and thus begins a process of deconstruction that takes the plot back to where it all started. It’s hard to pinpoint where Blue Oranges begins. The director has chosen an intricate flashback-and-forth mode of storytelling that he isn’t always able to carry off with elan. But the art is in the right place... a part of the plot is devoted to the hazy world of fake paintings and names like M.F. Husain are mentioned in passing.

Our sullen hero Kevin (newcomer Aham Sharma), we are told in whispers, paints fakes. He also fakes emotions when the questioning gets too close for comfort. He’s an enigma in a movie that unravels the mystery with insubstantial proof of its expertise.

Kevin probably murdered this rich alcoholic woman (Pooja Kanwal). The film’s sullen hero apparently didn’t show up for their wedding. But he shows up eight years later at her doorstep, his long- haired painter’s look replaced by short hair, spectacles and terse words that suggest he’s secretly unhappy.

Murder suspects pile up rather neatly. And the interrogation is done with a reasonable amount of expertise and restrain. No jokey cop-sidekicks, no item songs in smokey dens and no villains accumulating in the plot’s skyline like suspects lined up at the roadside.

At the vortex of this mildly engaging whodunit is a freelance investigative officer Nilesh (Rajit Kapoor) with a paraplegic daughter, who keeps reading books that no teenager should. In fact the girl gives the film its incongruous title. She’s the key to the puzzle of the murdered alcoholic woman who had men barging into her home unannounced.

If there are no highs in the narration, there are no plunging lows either. You come away from Blue Oranges hoping that murder victims in the future remember not to drive while drunk.

Caution is a predominant strain in the storytelling. The one stand-out performance comes from Rajit Kapoor who says the most oratorial line with the authority of a librarian who knows every book on the shelf by its binding.

The rest of the cast is passable, sometimes less. But that’s the way of the world. You win some, you lost most of it.

Subhash K. Jha, IANS