Saif can’t save this stock market trash
We might as well blame it on Martin Scorsese. Baazaar, directed by Gauravv K Chawla, is the kind of insipid film that demands someone take responsibility, and I fault the master behind The Wolf of Wall Street.
It’s not that this film copies that alarmingly dynamic one, but rather that this director is so obviously seduced by great films about the stock market that he rushes — eagerly and without preparation — onto the filmmaking floor to try and join the legends.
“Greed is good.” What the iconic line from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street doesn’t spell out is how compelling a storyteller needs to be to make greed look good.
Avarice is personified in the film by Saif Ali Khan. As a ruthless manipulator, Khan is impressively authoritative. It is admittedly hard to see him as a self-made man who studied at a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Surat, but Khan maintains a fine gruffness. He always seems to know what he’s talking about, even when likening himself to Batman — the superhero whose superpower is money. Alas, he isn’t the lead.
Rohan Mehra, son of the memorable actor Vinod Mehra, is a young man appallingly free of charisma. The debutant goes through the predictable motions of a shark-to-be, and does so without any discernible talent. Baazaar is slick, and could have been a passable B-movie if not for this lacklustre lead. I longed for the affably amoral Emraan Hashmi.
Mehra plays an ambitious young man from Allahabad who flies up the rungs of the stockbroking world, in the way characters do when writers are lazy: the problem is not in the wonder-kid knowing everything, but in the way nobody around him knows anything.
One impressed co-worker is Radhika Apte, utterly wasted. Apte is lovely in montages set to music — throwing her head back, laughing, casting a sideways glance — but the dialogue she’s given is pure cardboard. Like so: “I want people to stand on terraces to dream, not to commit suicide.”
The market manipulation and stock skulduggery are childish, but Chawla still borrows from stunning films like The Big Short. There is a reason the guy breaking the fourth wall in that film was the incomparably dashing Ryan Gosling. With Mehra, the flatness hurts. Chhokra dull chhe.
The primary issue with the mediocre Baazaar seems to me of intent. It appears Chawla didn’t truly attempt to tell a story. He’s a director who tried Wolf.