Cine Talk Smiles and giggles galore

Film: Housefull

Starring: Akshay Kumar, Deepika Padukone, Arjun

Rampal, Lara Dutta, Jiah Khan, Riteish Deshmukh

Directed by: Sajid Khan

This is a sly tongue-firmly-and-stubbornlyin-cheek, slick and chic comedy about a loser, or a panauti - a word that recurs ad nauseum in this glorious gasbag of giggles, winks, nudges and innuendos packaged with such polished panache, that you don’t really care what the inter-relations in the parodic plot finally signify.

Maybe they signify nothing more than a numbing but pleasantly diverting nothingness. But who the heck cares, as long as the tumble of confusions generates a hilarious havoc.

Housefull, as the title suggests, is chockful of characters who bump into one another and into hard surfaces (including the unresolved edges in the plot) without injury. It’s all done in ricocheting rhythms of laughter that rises from the pit of the plot’s belly and moves upwards towards us, sometimes missing its target.

More than the screenplay (Milap Zaveri, Sajid Khan, Vibha Singh) which moves helter-skelter in every direction away from the centre of the plot and just about succeeds in coming to a reasonably coherent conclusion, it is the bevy of characters who are positioned in the screenplay with a supreme sense of pyramidal aptness.

Every actor shines because he or she knows the idea is to have fun and to transmit that fun to the audience. It’s the actors’ responsibility to make the maze of inter-relations hold together. They succeed.

Yes, sometimes the actors seem to enjoy the comedy of energetic error more than we do. Beyond a point how many slap-

Powerful and gritty

Film: CityOfGold

Cast: Seema Biswas, Karan Patel, Ankush Chowdhary, Satish Kaushik and Kashmira Shah; Director: Mahesh Manjrekar

There is no room for artifice in Mahesh Manjrekar’s latest work. A raw, gritty look at the world of the ravaged, City Of Gold is as powerful in portraying a bereft working class as Molly Maguires was about Irish mine workers; except for the fact that there is no room for pretty visuals in City Of Gold Manjrekar’s chawl-life, captured on camera with merciless frankness by Ajit Reddy, is a bleak world of dreamers and losers who are often the one and the same. His heroes (if happy slipping-on-the-floor nudge-nudgewink-wink oops-we-did-it-again rolling of the eyes biting-of-the-tongue jokes can we take??

But somehow it all holds together. Like a jigsaw done in the pages of a comic book and then put on celluloid, Housefull evokes smiles and chuckles in cramped and wideopen spaces.

There is a casino in London where our loser-hero is beckoned to stem losses, a casino waitress (Lara Dutta) whose traditional Gujarati father (Boman Irani, as confidently spontaneous as ever) has disowned her for eloping with a man of her choice, a stern government agent (Arjun Rampal, the only actor who doesn’t get to smile in this chirpy chuckle-fest), a sexy widow (Lilette Dubey) and assorted characters who come and go in a whoosh of wacky misunderstandings, confused identity and half-resolved comic snarls.

Sajid Khan’s earlier film Heyy Babyy was a minty mix of mirth and maudlinism. Housefull is a fullon flamboyant farce. Strangely there’s a subtlety even tenderness at times, in the way Sajid Khan handles the satirical material centred on the theme of a loser who brings bad luck on himself so often that he begins to wonder if there’s a method to the madness of his destiny.

Unlike most situational comedies Housefull chooses the lower octaves of storytelling. The scale is pitched down. Even when the characters scream their lungs out, we don’t wince in discomfort.

This is the most wellbehaved comedy in recent times with an array of pert, but low-key performances.

Stripped of all buffoonery, Akshay Kumar does his most delicately balanced comic act ever. There’s a mellow maturity to the way he balances we may call the young characters that) are offered no hope of solace or redemption. This is the side of the slum that Danny Boyle missed when he made Slumdog Millionaire City Of Gold is neither stylish nor swanky enough to attract elitist readings of poverty. Fiercely radical in thought and intensely socialistic in execution, the film plunges beneath the poverty line to emerge with characters whose despair is not an act for the camera. The sweat and grime, the corruption and crime are characters of their own in Manjrekar’s chaotic world.

Mumbai never looked murkier and less inviting.

Taking a panoramic look at the lives of thousands of mill workers in Mumbai who went on an indefinite strike in 1982 is like trying to hold the ocean in a tea cup. Manjrekar, in what could easily be rated as his finest, most cogent work to date, does just that. He holds a universe in the eye of farce with a more underplayed style of comedy. Riteish Deshmukh provides Akshay with the right cues. So do the rest of the actors. Among the three glamorous and sexy ladies Lara Dutta has the best comic timing. Mention must be made of Chunky Pandey who brings the roof down with his Italian-Punjabi accent and burlesque.

Housefull looks and feels right. The climax in ‘Buckingham Palace’ (replete with Queen the camera. It is a world of the doomed and damned, no frills attached.

Elizabeth and Prince Charles look-alikes) depends too closely on a literal outflow of laughting gas. But that’s okay.

Delicacy of comic presentation is not a claim that Housefull makes. But moments of muffled tenderness just happen in the plot’s confounded journey of a loser from no-love to know-love.

Worth watching for its mix of the wacky and the more tender variety of laughter.

His return to fine form and the enrapturing energy level that sweeps across a multitude of lives without trivializing any of the characters are reasons enough to celebrate the joys of neo-realistic cinema.

But wait... City Of Gold not only marks the return of a storyteller who tells it like it is, without the comfort of shortcuts. It’s also a macroscopic look at people who populate the fringes. Their silent protests are seldom heard in cinema.

Not for a second do we feel any comforting distance from the misery of Manjrekar’s characters.

Manjrekar shoots his characters’ emotions in tight, comprehensive close-ups but wastes no time shedding excessive tears over their lives. The editor (Sarvesh Parab) cuts the raw material with ruthless economy, leaving no room for humbug and certainly no space for commercial embellishments.

So the question, what happened to those thousands of mill workers who were overnight rendered bankrupt after the mills closed down? You will find some uncomfortable answers in City Of Gold. But most of the time you will be faced with questions about the quality of life we choose to hand over to those who are economically and emotionally weak.

Would this film have worked without the actors who don’t look like they are facing a camera? The whole batallion of characters flicker to life as though they were a part of an extended family shot by hidden cameras for a reality show.

Television actor Karan Patel as the youngest scion of Manjrekar’s troubled family is a revelation. He portrays pain, humiliation, angst, compromise and anger with complete authority.