OUR CRITIC’S Kapil Sharma’s failed attempt!
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is a far more dramatic and perplexing affair than a comic one. Even then, there are some scenes and characters who unintentionally make you laugh. Rajasaab’s daughter, for instance. She has just returned from Oxford, but insists on speaking in the Queen’s English in an American accent, that too with fellow Indians.
One of the many reasons why the Ashutosh Gowariker directed Lagaan became such a huge hit was its emotional connect that seldom goes wrong for Indian audiences. A storyline with a group of poor old men and women pitted against the rich and the powerful; a budding romance; village dwellers shown as powerless; authoritative landowners who are invariably ruthless; and an over two- hourlong narrative offering confrontational plot with dollops of nationalism thrown in, cannot go wrong in arousing the right emotions among cinegoers. And yes, there has to be a song or two to keep your interests alive.
Kapil Sharma’s second film Firangi tries to rejig the Aamir Khan’s timeless classic with a motley mix of new and veteran supporting actors.
Considering that Sharma’s Bollywood debut in the lead Kis Kis Ko Pyar Karun was a disaster, I must confess that even before watching his latest, I had very low expectations. Even when I heard the booming Big B as the voiceover in the opening scenes, it didn’t affect me much. But 10 minutes into this technically- sound 160minute Rajiev Dhingra directed film which has good production values too, made me realize that, perhaps, Sharma, is serious about his career as a Bollywood hero too. Does he then have it in him to play the lead in a major film or can he carry an entire film on his shoulders with elan? Not all.
For all those talented lot of struggling actors, striving hard to find a toehold in Bollywood, it’s really unfair to let a standup ( who’s good at what he does and gets handsomely paid for it as well) hog so much screen time. That too, without so much as making the requisite effort to get serious about enacting such a significant lead hero’s character.
It’s 1921 in Punjab of British- ruled where the swadeshi vs the firangis are either engaged in bonhomie or seen in provocatively combative association. It also has a naïve and gullible Manga
( Sharma) who doesn’t believe that all firangis are wrong, falls in love with Sargi ( Ishita Dutta) but gets innocently drawn into Raja Indraveer Singh’s ( Kumud Mishra) machinations, when Singh colludes with the English official Mark Daniels ( Edward Sonnenblick) to dislodge the poor villagers from the inhabited land they had been occupying for decades, all for his personal gains and build liquor factory. Their deceit includes a marriage alliance between Daniels and Rajasaab’s Oxford- educated daughter Shyamali ( Monica Gill).
With so much accurate history as the backdrop and so much material to rely on, the film could have hit the jackpot. Sharma must have also believed that he could do a Khan when he decided to produce this film. But the role clearly goes against his grain; his deadpan expression, puffed up eyes that may be underline his fatigue, don’t make him appear comfortable in the film, thought it duration. It’s only when, in a couple of scenes, he inadvertently allows himself to play Manga as the slow- witted nerdy orderly that he begins to shine a bit. By and large, he disappoints and never looks the part. Neither does he feel the lines he delivers. For instance, in a scene, when the British use Manga to hoodwink the villagers into signing their property papers they hold so dear, the helplessness he displays or his efforts in winning back his fellow village folks’ trust is hardly palpable. He is too casual in his approach, and it doesn’t work. His resolve to set things right, too falls flat.
As a stand- up comedian, Sharma has a simple definition of comedy that mostly makes fun of people, and appeals to a certain kind of audience. If this was intended as a comedy- drama hybrid it might have worked. But to illustrate it against the real- life backdrop — such guidelines work as an organic whole, and not when the threat of individual success takes root. The film gets tricky when the focus shifts from individuals to one man — Sharma. The urge and propelling actions for personal gain rubs up uncomfortably against the goals of the entire film.
In some ways, that also explains my reaction to this film as a whole.
Firangi is a far more dramatic and perplexing affair than a comic one. Even then, there are some scenes and characters who unintentionally make you laugh. Rajasaab’s daughter, for instance. She has just returned from Oxford, but insists on speaking in the Queen’s English in an American accent, that too with fellow Indians.
Other actors suffer. A few of them who deserve much better and fleshed out roles like Anjan Srivastava, Jameel Khan, Rajesh Sharma, Ram Gopal Bajaj and Kumud Mishra, don’t have much meat in their ill- conceived roles. The biggest undoing is to interweave languorously the noncooperation movement — that led to the Quit India movement subsequently — with a love story and a story on guile and fraud. Despite such concrete premise, the screenplay hardly ever uses anything worthwhile to add some substance or to stir up action.
Of course, Sharma laboring to look ‘ serious’ is a miscast and proves to be the biggest drawback of the film.
And at the end, just like the man he plays in the film, who can cure a crick or a backache by kicking the patient on the bum, you feel like giving one such hard- hitting one at this ambitious actor.
He must get back to his serious business of comedy.
The staircase should be billed along with the stars in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? ( 1962). On a claustrophobic set, it dominates many shots, separating the upstairs captivity of the paraplegic Blanche from the downstairs lair of her deranged sister Jane. Although the two sisters live in a “mansion” that allegedly once belonged to Valentino, it is jammed between nosy neighbours and seems to consist only of a living room, a kitchen, a hallway and a bedroom for each sister. In this hothouse a lifelong rivalry turns vicious, in one of Hollywood’s best gothic grotesqueries.
The story involves sisters who were once movie stars, played by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The casting is one of the crucial successes of the film, although it is hard to imagine how Aldrich convinced the two divas to appear together. Rivals since the 1930s, competitive, vain and touchy, they by all accounts hated each other in real life. It is claimed on IMDb. com that in the scene where Jane kicks the helpless Blanche, Davis kicked Crawford so hard a cut required stitches. This is surely an urban legend, since the actual contact takes place below frame and Crawford would not have been present for the shot.
What wasn’t an urban legend was that the two were fiercely competitive; it’s possible that each agreed to do the picture only because she was jealous of the other’s starring role. In the event, it was Davis who emerged on top, winning an Oscar nomination as the former child star who was now a shrill gargoyle with makeup pancaked all over her face. Davis was nothing if not courageous, as she abandoned all shreds of vanity and overacted her heart out. Crawford plays the quieter, kinder, more reasonable sister — and, it must be said, the less interesting.
The movie begins in the days of vaudeville, when Baby Jane Hudson was a child star famous for her saccharine performance of I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy — a letter she seals with a kiss and mails to heaven. Offstage, she was a spoiled monster, screaming for ice cream, ridiculing her plain sister Blanche. But in their 20s it is Blanche who becomes the Hollywood queen, and Jane whose appeal fades and whose movies flop. Their lives change forever when, in a mysterious incident, their car crushes Blanche against a gate, paralysing her from the waist down.
Why she is put in charge of the “care” of her sister is hard to understand, despite some mumbling about a studio “coverup”. What results is the situation for the rest of the film, with Blanche trapped in a wheelchair in an upstairs bedroom, and Jane calling the shots. Blanche has two contacts with the world: her telephone and their kind maid, Elvira ( Maidie Norman). But as Jane’s hatred grows more venomous, she rips out the phone, sends Elvira away and beats the maid when she bravely tries to return.
At some point during this descent into madness, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? stops becoming a “camp classic”, which is how it’s often described, and starts becoming the real thing, a psychological horror story. Davis tilts her performance toward Jane’s pathological ego, which is displayed in a macabre adult performance of I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy. It also emerges in her behaviour towards a peculiar gentleman caller, Edwin Flagg ( Victor Buono), who she proposes to hire as a pianist to accompany her during a comeback. She flatters herself that Edwin is attracted to her, failing to see that he is not the marrying kind. Edwin towers over his elderly mother, the tiny Marjorie Bennett, in a relationship as closed- off as the sisters’.
Upstairs, Blanche grows more desperate. She tries to toss a note to their next- door neighbour, but Jane finds it in the driveway. She hopes for help from Elvira, but Jane drives her away. She wheels her chair to the top of the staircase, which looms vertiginously below her. Her horrors are only beginning. I will not reveal what her sister serves her at one meal, but the next day, when she complains of hunger, Jane tells her, “You’re not gettin’ your breakfast because you didn’t eat your din- din.” When the next meal finally arrives, we stare with as much horror as Blanche does at the silver dome concealing whatever is on her plate.
The impact of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was considerable in 1962. Today’s audiences, perhaps not familiar with the stars, don’t fully realise how thoroughly Crawford, and specially Davis, trashed their screen images with the coaching of Aldrich. Imagine two contemporary great beauties — Julia Roberts and Cate Blanchett, say — as aged crones. The personal dislike between Crawford and Davis no doubt deepened the power of their onscreen relationship; the critic Richard Scheib observes: “The irony that only came out in later years is that the roles were uncommonly close to the truth upon the parts of both actresses — Crawford and Davis were both utterly vain, particularly when it came to their own celebrity, both abused their own family members and both had daughters who wrote books about the cruelty of their parents.”
Robert Aldrich ( 1918- 1983) was a master of Hollywood genres, whose credits include Vera Cruz ( 1954), with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster; Kiss Me Deadly ( 1956), a Mickey Spillane classic; Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte ( 1964), which was intended to reunite Davis and Crawford before Crawford fell ill ( one story) or was fired because she fought with Davis ( possibly apocryphal); The Dirty Dozen ( 1967); The Longest Yard ( 1974), and the underrated Hustle ( 1975). None of them were art pictures, but most of them were popular, profitable, well- crafted and splendid examples of their genres. He was one of the first mainstream directors to insist on autonomy in selecting stories, actors and editors.
Making What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? he possibly thought of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard ( 1950), which starred Gloria Swanson as an ageing movie queen, living on in her mansion. He began with a novel by Henry Farrell, which moved its ageing queens further down on the artistic and financial scale, and emphasised the violence over the pathos. He knew he was asking for trouble by pairing Davis and Crawford, but he guessed, correctly, that trouble would translate into a better film. And at the end of the day it was Davis who won the ancient battle, by upstaging Crawford, winning the nomination and making the pseudo- sequel Charlotte. She may not have been a pretty sight mincing her way through an old- age version of I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy, but she was a trouper, and no one who has seen the film will ever forget her.