Iqbal

This is yet another brilliant offering from Nagesh Kukunoor. Like a good chef, he takes a simple recipe and executes it perfectly with good ingredients to produce a great result. The actors and technical departments are top-quality, the story is original and refreshingly simple, and the direction is perfect.

Iqbal is the story of a deaf-mute village boy, born at the moment of India's 1983 Cricket World Cup triumph (or perhaps when Kapil Dev won the semi-final match against Zimbabwe almost single-handedly). Iqbal has an innate but unschooled talent for cricket. The story is about his struggles to learn the game overcoming his own physical limitations, his father's restrictions, and the political intricacies of cricket academies; and whether he can triumph over the many obstacles that come in his way.

The film excels in its immersive realization of the its environment. The setting of the film is that of a village somewhere in India, where Iqbal spends his days tending his father's buffaloes. The story-telling in this movie and its pacing are in harmony with the simplicity of the environment. It is a very textural movie. You can almost feel the grass under your feet when Iqbal gets ready to bowl. The dull thud you hear when Iqbal drives his makeshift tree-branch stumps into the ground almost convinces you you can smell the sap. You can almost smell the haystack on which Iqbal's mentor Mohit (played by Naseeruddin Shah) wakes up after a night of drunkenness. When Iqbal first walked into Mohit's shadowy ancestral British-era haveli, I could almost feel the dank coolness inside. I've never seen a small-town cricket training academy or stadium, but after watching this movie, I imagine I have a feel for what they must be like.

This is one of those rare films where many different actors get a lot of screen time. Shreyas Talpade as the title character Iqbal dominates the screen for most of the time, of course, but the other actors' characters are all very well-developed as well. Shweta Prasad excels in the role of Khadija (Iqbal's sister). Naseeruddin is superb as Mohit; you can almost feel his drunken character's hangover each morning. Girish Karnad gives a balanced performance as the political Guruji, capturing the character's ambiguous morality. Prateeksha Lonkar and Yateen Karyekar are perfect as Iqbal's parents. But the star is, of course, Shreyas Talpade. Talpade seems to work with Kukunoor a lot, and it seems like one of those win-win professional relationships. This movie really showcases how fine an actor Talpade really is. It's hard to describe it all, but there's no single place in this movie where what he does looks the least bit unusual. His look of mild incomprehension at conversations he can't hear, his moments of elation, perplexity, gloom and his usual neutral good cheer, Talpade does them all, neither underdoing nor overdoing them.

And now for my pet peeve with Indian sports movies: again, this movie fails to showcase the sport it is based on. This movie may have captured the spirit of the cricket institutions themselves. But I would have loved to see some insane inswingers or yorkers. I wanted to see Iqbal scalp Kamal's (Adarsh Balakrishna) wicket with a ball so good that I'd burst out in spontaneous applause. These could have been bowled by a mainstream bowler and sliced in with Talpade's action. To Talpade's credit, he has a pretty reasonable bowling action. But the ball trajectories are played down a bit and they are nothing to write home about. In this context, I am reminded of the excellent football movie Goal starring Pele and Sly Stallone. I'd like to see a movie with that kind of reverence for the technical game itself.

This is not the kind of film that induces extreme emotional responses. It is low-key, not designed for one-a-minute thrills, maudlin emotional blows or cringe-inducing evil. Even the worst character in the movie (Guruji) is simply political, not evil or malevolent or even particularly antagonistic towards Iqbal. This movie treats its subject matter with respect. But that doesn't mean it's dry or fails to connect with the viewer. It's highly enjoyable, realistic cinema.

Chuk De India: Pleasantly different from most Bollywood fare!

Shimit Amin seems to be shaping up as one of India's best directors. This is his second movie, and both were excellent, multi-faceted and multi-layered movies. According to wikipedia, Chuk De India received mostly negative reviews from film critics -- scores of 2/5 and the like. Perhaps the critics are a big impediment to good cinema in India. This movie is definitely up there, just a little below Lagaan and other classics.

Chuk De India is a movie with hockey as a central theme, but it is about much, much more than hockey. It makes statements on so many levels that it is worth spending some time on them.

Most Bollywood films are not really pan-Indian in spirit. They divide India into zones:

• "India": The "real" India consists only of Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, UP and to a lesser extent Bihar, Bengal and, especially in older films, Kashmir.
• "South India": Everyone living "over there" is a "Madrasi". According to Bollywood, these are weirdos who have heads smeared with vibhooti and start their sentences with "AAAIY AAIYA JEE... AAMA AATA JEE..." type nonsense popularized by Mehmood and assiduously cultivated by Bollywood ever since.
• Nonexistent India: The rest of India, especially the North East (Assam, Tripura, Sikkim, Nagaland, Arunachal, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya), Orissa, and to some extent MP are completely left out of all Bollywood films.

First of all, this movie lampoons stereotypes (which, sadly, Bollywood propagates).

• It actively seeks to break the South Indian stereotype, but it does fall short: it makes the common mistake of pronouncing and spelling "Telugu" as "Telegu". This shouldn't have happened in a film that is making it a point to show that Telugu is not the same as Tamil. But that's really nitpicking, the spirit was right.
  
• We see much more of Europe, America and Australia in Bollywood films than some parts of our own country. This film features individuals from Manipur and Mizoram and makes it a point to note that they are as Indian as anyone else. Again, the film falls a little short of the mark: none of the people who are not from traditional Bollywood's "core India" get a major role.
• In India, Cricket is treated as being the only worthwhile sport. A lot of characters in the film look down upon hockey -- an impediment that the players have to face. It was an interesting decision to use hockey instead of cricket in the movie. Director Shimit Amin handles this very well. By the middle of the movie, I was quite excited about hockey.

Next, this movie makes a very strong statement on women's rights. This forms a theme that runs throughout the movie: the women are expected to give up what they want for families and boyfriends. None of this is over the top; it is handled with fine balance, showcasing the frustration of women who are on the edge of something great but have no one to share it with, least of all their families.

For a change from typical Bollywood movies, all of the characters are developed well in this movie. Each one has a little story, ordinary but interesting. The team members' quirks are alternately amusing and aggravating. The interactions between the members of the team are normal -- seniors bullying junior players, people taking a dislike to each other because of some initial incident, cliques and factions with grouches against each other or against the coach. Much of the movie is a well-paced story about how the players and coach gradually grow to like each other and come together as a team.

Shah Rukh Khan is finally displaying what a good actor he is. He always had the potential, but for the first 10 years or so of his career chose films requiring fairly ridiculous "M-M-M-Main-Main T-T-T-Tu-Tu" type stuttering as a substitute for comedy and an identical persona in roles that were really quite varied. I didn't like him in those years, but his role in Swades was great. In Chuk De India, his character is not fleshed out in much detail. The character had an incident when he was a hockey player 7 years before the main events of the movie, was branded a traitor and had to go into hiding, a button that's easy to push. For most of the movie, he is a tough, impassive coach: a role that doesn't require much acting. But for all that, Shah Rukh handled the role reasonably well.

Chuk De India also has high levels of realism, a quality Amin also displayed in his Ab Tak Chchappan. Indian sports movies typically feature actors who very obviously can't play the sport. Most of the realizations of Indian scenes are unrealistically glamorous: posh bathrooms,designer clothes, and over-the-top attitudes are pleasantly missing from this movie. Chak De India's actors look like they can actually play hockey. And they behave and live like real Indians. And the facilities in the movie look like real Indian facilities. When the team ends up in Australia, the scenes there and the reactions of the Indian team are very believable.

The sport itself is showcased much less that I would have liked. Although the nature of the movie draws the audience into the game, there are no cool hockey moves or tricks, nothing that would excite anyone actually interested in the game itself. None of the type of magic that prompted officials to inspect Dhyan Chand's hockey stick! There are some scenes where the coach plans strategy with the players, but these are just atmospheric scenes. The strategies are not shown in the movie. This is the one area where I felt the movie could have done better.

Overall, it was a fantastic movie. India needs more movies as balanced as Chuk De India, and it needs more directors like Shimit Amin.