FILM: Club 60
CAST: Farooque Sheikh, Sarika, Raghubir Yadav, Satish Shah, Tinu Anand, Sharad Saxenaa and Vineet Kumar
DIRECTOR: Sanjay Tripathi
When was the last time a movie moved you anywhere except out of the theatre in a hurry to get home? Club 60 is that modern day rarity that brings the soul back to our cinema.
A story of aging and despair dappled by dashes of warmth and humour, Club 60 is embellished with endearing imperfections – jaunty editing which only adds to its humane appeal. The film has so much love and warmth to give, it breaks your heart to think that mortality could be so hurtful.
But that’s life. There is always death and despair around the corner.
Bereavement, in this case the loss of a child, has been done to ever lasting brilliancy by Mahesh Bhatt in “Saaransh”. What “Club 60” does is to position the pain of the bereaved parents in a far less dramatic way than the one occupied by Anupam Kher and Rohini Hattangadi in Bhatt’s film.
Mumbai with its cruelly dispassionate rhythms is the location for Sarika and Farooque Sheikh’s unshed grief. Cinematographer Shymanand Jha shoots the city with reverent noiselessness.
It’s a world of high rise apartments, tennis courts and insulated tragedy where the upper middle-class characters don’t confront their sorrow until pushed into a corner.
Like shards of broken glass, debutant director Tripathi looks at the broken lives of these autumnal characters with tender care and minute ministration.
Emotions rule over the plot. But the director never allows them to overwhelm the characters.
There is a remarkable restraint in the depths of the anguish of the aged characters, epitomized by Sarika in a role that allows her true métier to emerge in beads of brilliance. Playing a wife who must submerge her own grief at her only son’s loss in the face of her husband’s monstrous depression, Sarika brings much needed gravitas and dignity to her part.
Her sequence in the balcony where she confronts her husband’s demoniacal grief, or earlier when she asks the friendly shrink (Harsh Chhaya, finding meat in a skeletal role) if she is guilty of less grief than her husband, are illustrative of a talent that knows how to confront its character’s emotions without losing perspective.
Not that Farooque lags behind. As a grieving father who won’t allow his loss to be forgotten, he hits all the right notes treading that thin line between the melancholy and maudlin with majestic grace.
Indeed the film is treasure house of veteran actors at their luminous littoral lending to the film a kind of emphatic excellence that perhaps would have been denied to the film if it featured lesser actors.
Here are opportunity starved actors sinking into their characters as though they own them – Raghubir Yadav as a loutish resident wearing tee-shirts meant for 12-year olds, Tinu Anand as the shayar who sings and farts with equal intensity, Sharad Saxena as the horny guy who gets cleaned out by a hefty hooker (Mona Wasu), and especially Satish Shah as an ostensibly miserly tycoon who has one of the best lines in the film to utter.
Tripathi’s dialogues glimmer with a gorgeous depth of emotions. But the film never wallows in schmaltzy sentimentality. Towards the end the quest for a formal climax in the plot does turn the narrative into a mass of dramatic postures.
That apart, there is so much to cling to in this story of hope for the hopeless, you can’t thank the director enough for bringing that forgotten lump back into the throat.
Club 60 brings feelings back into our cinema. Love, loss, life….a lingering sense of playful yet pensive nostalgia runs through this sincere and moving film on autumnal lives. And yes, after a long time there is melodious music.
There are just three-four songs in the film. But they don’t break the serene spell of the storytelling.The melody adds.
Likewise the cosmos covered by the film. So gentle and so much heart. You can’t miss it. (IANS)
FILM: R…Rajkumar
CAST: Shahid Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha, Sonu Sood
DIRECTOR: Prabhudheva
Silent hoja, nahin toh main violent ho jaaonga…. says our rowdy-side Romeo hero. This clangorous film’s besotted hero Romeo Rajkumar is fond of blurting out the silent-violent catch-line at the most inopportune moments… maybe he likes the sound of the words and doesn’t care to hold up its relevance in his deeds.
His demand for silence in a film that revels in raucousness is as irrational and morally untenable as seeking salvation in Asaram’s ashram.
R … Rajkumar is a very noisy film. Empty aerated bottles fly across the colourful kitschy frames hitting hard surfaces, mainly skulls and shattering every shred of the equilibrium that might have existed if Prabhudheva’s kingdom of anarchy before heroes and villains with knives(never guns in this film) decided to get so mad, they had to get even against all odds.
Welcome to the world of wacky wickedness where Shahid Kapoor lords with ludicrous loudness over characters who don’t know where to stop. And Prabhudheva’s direction follows suit. The plot is wafer-thin, certainly slimmer than the film’s large-built leading lady.
There is an immensely endearing moment between Sonakshi Sinha and Shahid Kapoor where she makes fun of his height. He retaliates by taking a dig at her weight. It’s a decisive moment in the storytelling where the parameters of impunity are well set for the couple as well as for the script’s dynamics regarding the love relationship between the two.
These two love birds will go to any lengths to be one-up on their adversaries. Sonu Sood plays the arch-villain as a delicious mix of the mean and the mirthful. This guy deals in danger and yet somehow he doesn’t mean to be so mean.
If you know what I mean.
The violent love story streaks across a horizon of hectic action sequences topped by a monstrously over-the-top climax where Shahid and Sonu beat each other to a pulp. This 20-minute climax could have been cut by half, as too the songs which though interestingly filmed (Prabhudheva after all) add only splashes of flamboyant colour on an already over-cluttured canvas.
Prabhudheva’s comicbook energy is back in action in this fast furious and funny cocktail of mirth and mayhem. A heady unsteady mix of humour and rowdyism that only Prabhudheva can pull off. Yeah, we’ve seen it all in “Wanted” and “Rowdy Rathod”. But there is something sexily bullish about Prabhudheva’s cinema.
Yes, the mystery of the asterisks in the title is slyly revealed. Romeo and not Rambo is the flavour of the season. We saw a very violent Romeo in “…Ram Leela” recently. Now we see a very love-struck Rambo in “R… Rajkumar”.
To their credit, director Prabhudheva and Shahid Kapoor have a lot of fun with the feisty hyper-ventilating material which is often short of breath, but proudly so. Neither silent nor offensively violent “R… Rajkumar” is a fun take on the hero and the tyrant.