Cine Talk Good chemistry between Shahid, Kareena

Film: Milenge Milenge

Starring: Shahid Kapoor, Kareena Kapoor

Directed by: Satish Kaushik

There is a kind of subverted joy in watching Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor play a Valentinian romance with a full-throttle gusto. Milenge Milenge took its time to come to the theatres. Yes, it is old fashioned in theme. But not dated. The material which must have been quite bulky by the time Kaushik was done with shooting has been cut and pasted with restrained enthusiasm. What we have is a paper-thin, sometimes cute at times annoying rom-com where Destiny plays a pivotal part. Kiss-mat, anyone? Yup, intimacy is fugitive between Shahid and Kareena. But they nonetheless look like a real pair.

The plot plods at a pace that suggests love is just about the only force that keeps the universe moving. Both the protagonists play professionals. But we hardly see them work except on their ever-palpitating hearts.

The plot invents various devices from missed flights to truant elevators to hero in drag and heroine

A believable Maoist story

Film: Red Alert: The War Within

Cast: Suniel Shetty, Sameera

Reddy, Ashish Vidyarthi, Vinod

Khanna, Seema Biswas, Ayesha

Dharker, Bhagyashree

Director: Anant Mahadevan

Arundhati Roy called their fight the single greatest resistance against oppression in the world, while our prime minister, the deceptively genial Manmohan Singh, called them the greatest internal security threat.

Between these extreme reports of their bringing rural-equality and their massacres, what’s the truth about the Maoists or Naxalites?

What is their motivation, and why has this movement of the 1960s recently gathered momentum for such extreme views to develop?

Between thE hero-worship of Roy and the hyperbole of Singh, lies Red Alert

When Narasimha (Shetty) gets caught in the crossfire between police and Maoists, he is rescued and taken along by Maoists. Here he lives among the outlaws and become one of them. However, a farmer cannot really come to terms with killing people and he is at loggerheads with the Maoist group’s leader Velu (Vidhyarthi).

Through the eyes of Narasimha Red Alert shows us the life of the ‘red’ rebels who live and fight in the jungles. It paints their motivations, their weaknesses, their compassion and brutality, while never once patronising the rebels, the police, or the viewer. Everything in the film, like in life, is grey.

The Maoist movement began as a resistance against the oppression of landlords in the 1960s and today it is a violent resistance against the new landlords - government backed MNCs and national companies who want to make profit at the cost of the very people living there and of the environment, not to mention the nation if you consider deeper economics.

Fighting them are the armed forces of the country - the police and paramilitary in glycerine to keep the love birds apart for two hours. There are some heartwarming moments depicting random hearts pumping into a collective despair as time ticks by.

There’s no attempt to pull punches, no over-clever dialogues and no effort to paint and gloss the feeling of love with sassy ‘cool’ lines. Director Satish Kaushik plays the romance on the straight and narrow path. And that’s just about the most comforting aspect of this basic simple and predictable boy-meets-girl tale.

The principal performances range from precocious to authentic. Surprisingly Shahid tends to go overboard in the early comic sequences.

But he makes up for the excesses in the second-half with expressions of a lover’s anguish over Cupid’s awry arrow.

Kareena looks gorgeous and slim in some scenes, gorgeous and relatively plump in other scenes. In totality the chemistry is quite palpable, much more so than in some of the other much-hyped love stories that arrived lately with a bang and fizzled out without the pang of love being palpable in a single frame.

In Milenge Milenge you do feel for the lovers. Maybe it has to do with the fact that we know what the film’s lovers do not: that the actors playing them were themselves in a long relationship not too long ago. But hush!

Subhash K. Jha

forces. How then have they been able to survive the might of the state? The film gives examples of how they often bring justice and fair wages to the rural populace, leading to their support. Instead, because of the use by security forces of various injudicious methods like rape and burning of villages as a weapon against Maoists, they have only further alienated the people who have found no recourse but to become guerrillas themselves. Red Alert depicts this reality with precision.

Director Anant Mahadevan has done a commendable job of accumulating a motley group of great actors who do not fail the story and their parts. The lead, Suniel Shetty, however, looks like a rank amateur pitted against this ensemble of actors like Seema Biswas, Ayesha Dharker, Ashish Vidhyarthi and Vinod Khanna. Even Nasseruddin Shah in a two minute cameo as a drunkard soars, telling us once more as to why many worldwide consider him a living legend. The dialogues and treatment are crisp and sympathetic to both the sides. The details of Maoist movement and modus operandi are well in tune with known facts, and so is that of the security forces.

The main drawback of the film, however, is that it often ends up becoming a mere document of these, rather than a cinematic reinterpretation. Though, even in this it does a commendable job, interweaving multiple plots and characters believably.

In the end, the film also tries to elucidate a third way of peace and prosperity for all. But it seems more utopic than real as it relies on the good nature of otherwise greedy Indians.

Yet it is a triumph that in such charged times, the film not only got made but found a release. Hats off to every filmmaker like Anant Mahadevan who dares to venture to cinematic realms few dare go.

Satyen K. Bordoloi