FILM: Dolly Ki Doli
Cast: Sonam Kapoor, Rajkummar Yadav, Pulkit Samrat, Varun Singh
DIRECTOR: Abhishek Dogra
It works on the idea level.
A spunky spirited girl who unapologetically cleans up unsuspecting bridegrooms on the wedding night. And by cleaning up, we don’t mean what you think.
There is no sex, not even a kiss. This one helluva feisty con woman is out to take revenge on mankind after being dumped by a guy. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, they say. Scornfully presumptuous as it rolls up the wedding tent over and over again to facilitate our Dolly’s wicked designs (and we don’t mean the luscious lehngas and the alluring cholis), “Dolly Ki Doli” is the sort of cinema where laughter at a social evil (the girl child’s lack of options in life) drowns the din of implausibility.
The plot works its way through three episodes, each displaying Sonam Kapoor’s vivacious charms in oodles of opulent ‘show-sha-giri’.
This is North India where everyone has to be loud and coarse. Archana Puransingh leads the banshee bandwagon. She screams even the punctuations between her lines. And expects laughter for pronouncing ‘Bra’ as ‘Buhraa’.
Sonam gets to create humour out of even ‘woh auraton wali problem’ to get away from doing the needful with husband no.2 on her wedding night.
Husband No.2 is played by the cherubic Varun Sharma who was last seen raising a laugh riot in “Fukrey”. Here Sharma and the rest of the very talented cast must make do with paper-thin wit lining the spoken lines. They stubbornly cling to the hope of humour.
What carries the slim film up that hill to the finishing line are the actors. They all seem to be extra-protective of the flimsy material. The plot about a girl who cons her way through numerous marriages is constantly treading shaky grounds. It’s the actors who keep the humour from sagging. Specially good are Rajkummar Rao and Varun Sharma as the two jilted grooms bonding over their betrayal.
There is a sequence where Varun over drinks asks Rajkummar if she gave ‘it’ to him. Rajkummar pretends to have done ‘it’.
Male bonding at its most delusional. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub as the guy who secretly loves Dolly while he must pose as her brother at sham weddings is the only actor who introduced a sense of seriousness to this tale filled with a mocking rage over a social system that doesn’t allow a certain section of women to choose whom they want to sleep, or not sleep, with.
What works for Dolly Ki Doli is Sonam in the title role.
Sonam’s character belongs to the cattle class and yet refuses to be cowed down. Spirited till the end, she plays the film’s hero in every respect, owning up to the conning game that men have played from days of Dev Anand in “Jaal” to Ranveer Singh in “Ricky Behl Versus The Ladies”.
Why should the boys have the fun? Dolly seems to ask with that mischievous glint in her eyes.
If only the character had been provided with a better place to spread her wings.
Dolly Ki Doli works in parts, those parts where the runaway bride doesn’t have to justify her waywardness even to her closest associates.
The take-it-or-leave-it attitude suits Sonam’s Dolly fine. It doesn’t work for the film, though.
For a film filled with fun festivity and frolic, the music and songs including the item song filmed on the queen of the genre Malaika Arora Khan, are poorer for their vapidity.
Incidentally, producer Arbaaz Khan was not quite telling the truth when he claimed his superstar brother had no place in this film. Salman Khan not only makes a surprise appearance at the end, Pulkit Samrat seems to be aping the star all through.(IANS)
FILM: Baby
Cast: Akshay Kumar, K K Menon, Tapsee Pannu, Anupam Kher, Rana Daggubati, Mikaal Zulfikar, Rashid Naaz
DIRECTOR: Neeraj Pandey
Don’t move! The concept of the edge-of-the-seat thriller seems to have been invented for Neeraj Pandey’s enormously engaging take on international terrorism. It takes guts to make a film which calls a spade a spade…Or Pakistan the hub of terrorism in the Asian subcontinent.
With Baby, Pandey immediately and irreversibly joins the ranks of the finest contemporary filmmakers of our times.
Outwardly Baby, with its theme of a bunch of bravehearts apprehending international terrorists at the risk of their own lives and their family’s well being, has nothing to offer that we haven’t seen in several films in the counter-terror genre before. What places “Baby” far above the routine thrillers is its refreshing lack of circumvention in the storytelling.
Straight away Pandey’s film takes us inside the life of counter-terrorism expert Ajay (Akshay Kumar) as he grapples to locate a colleague who has been betrayed by one of their own and taken hostage by terrorists.
In Baby there is a palpable predilection for building unbearably suspenseful action sequences without losing the essential authenticity of the situation. All through the riveting drama, Ajay and his team (Tapsee Pannu, Rana Daggubati and other splendidly in-character actors who show up with him in different sections of the narrative) push the envelope of counter-terrorism without toppling into the abyss of self-congratulation.
We sense we are in the midst of a very important docu-drama on the violence of our times. A part of the film’s edifying mood of bridled energy comes from Akshay Kumar’s screen presence. He is in control, powerful and effective without throwing his muscles around the screen to prove his heroic stature.
One of the film’s most interesting sub-texts is its attitude to heroism and machismo. Ajay and his team are doing a job. They want to do it as any professional. The difference lies in the mortality level: this hero and his team could get killed at any time. And you know what? They don’t care!
Pandey keeps the proceedings tightly wound, and yet we never feel the weight of the epic plot as it coils and recoils through a labyrinth of subverted idealism and crushed diabolism. The narrative is structured as a spiral of dread, doom and a kind of romantic hope of heroic redemption from the cesspool of terror-violence that grips the world.
Though nothing in the film’s design suggests any conscious attempt to create a mood-specific thriller, the film keeps us spellbound from first frame to last. Yes, the airport climax where our heroes (standing ovation for them is in order) make their getaway from a middle-eastern country seems inspired by Ben Affleck’s “Argo”. No harm in that…Creativity is never self-generated.
Helming, navigating and controlling this bridled exposition on anarchy is Akshay Kumar with his career’s best performance.
His interpretation of an unsung hero’s stubborn determination to rescue the world from chaos, is mature and restrained, even when pitched against veteran actors with a formidable history of one-upmanship.
Watch him in the dexterously designed sequence where he exchanges ideological barbs with a terrorist Taufeeq (Jamal Khan).
Watch out for the solid supporting performances. Each actor, even in the smallest role, knows he is part of a work that attempts to project the grim reality of our violence-ridden world without losing the inherent cinematic quality in the narration. In various sections of the film Danny Denzongpa, Sushant Singh, Tapsee Pannu (as a desi Lara Croft, she is a delight), K K Menon and Anupam Kher appear to excel without trying to. (IANS)