Friday (Malayalam) - Review

Boasting of a large ensemble cast and more characters than are absolutely necessary, debutante director Lijin Jose’sFriday is an often meandering but still engaging effort, one that must be lauded for its sheer audacity in terms of the number of stories that are woven together.

Set in the time span of a day, a Friday to be precise, the film jumps between various characters, ordinary people like you and me, many of whom have come for various reasons via ferry into the town of Alappuzha, better known to non-Keralites as Alleppey.

The characters range from an irritable autorickshaw driver, a family headed by a father whose youngest daughter is to be married in a week, a childless couple who intend to adopt a young girl, a couple of hoodlums who are trying to sell some sort of exotic animal on the sly, a pregnant beggar woman with another child in her hand, and many, many more stories and characters. In fact, even as I listed the ones I did, I thought of so many more that I haven’t.

There are so many characters and stories in Friday that about three quarters of an hour are spent just establishing them. That is perhaps the one big flaw in the film – it could easily have done without so many of the characters and stories, and have still been just as engaging.

Nevertheless, once each story reaches its own little turning point, the film picks up steam. The film then proceeds at breakneck speed as every story hurtles towards its own little ending, even as a number of the hitherto unrelated characters come together for a larger, more conventional climax.

One of the problems with having so many stories running parallel is the fact that there are too many false climaxes and resolutions. I could sense some of the more fidgety members of the audience desperately wondering what exactly was going on. The narrative is by no means complex, but it demands your total attention in order to truly make sense of what is going on.

The experience of immersing yourself into the lives of so many characters is made even more convincing because of the actors playing the characters. Fahad Fazil is excellent as the autorickshaw driver in need of money, who is then faced with a moral dilemma. ThespianNedumudi Venu is pitch perfect as the hassled father of the bride-to-be, while Vijayraghavan playing the kindly police office helping them out is excellent as well. Many of the other performances, too many to list out, are fairly convincing.

What really works for the film is that each of the stories depicts the life of a real person, carving out a little slice of it for the audience to savour. The parallel narrative, something that I always enjoy, adds to the overall experience. The last few moments of the film were daring, something that very few filmmakers would have attempted.

While there are no standout technical achievements in the film, with the cinematography and background score being purely functional, credit must be given to the editor for handling so many stories and weaving them together without ever making the audience wait too long for the next snippet of each story. Going back to the background score, I often felt that the choice of background pieces during certain scenes was poor, detracting from the intended impact of the scene rather than adding to it.

In spite of its hiccups, Friday is still a film that is worth a watch. It is heartening to see a young filmmaker have the vision to attempt something that is by no means easy and manage to justice to it for the most. Lijin Jose is a director to watch out for and Friday is a film that I’d recommend to anyone who likes being completely engaged and involved in a film.

Heroine - Review

Welcome to the world of 'babes', one-upmanship, over-reaction. Welcome to the cut-throat world of the Hindi film industry, Bollywood. Or so you are made to believe.Heroine doesn't sink in any deeper than these two lines. However, like a Madhur Bhandarkar film, it does spend quite some time with its lead character, Mahi Arora (Kareena Kapoor). Mahi's character builds interestingly but unfortunately her story has nothing out of the ordinary to hold the film together. It's almost as if the character wasn't written but just happened to happen.

It's great that Heroine picks not a typical top star as his lead character, nor is she a struggling actress who's rise we see from the very beginning. Her journey is told to us from somewhere in the middle. At a point in which she's most distraught and finds her way to a police station for a reason that is not told to us immediately and when you do find out, you can't believe the pettiness of the issue. I doubt the character or the writer/director knew why she was there.

But meanwhile, Kareena Kapoor gets to insecure, distraught, failure, glamorous of course and bipolar! Though she seemed more depressed than bipolar, but hey that's nitty-gritty, right? But, the point here is that whatever Kareena is asked to do, she works really hard in getting it right. She looks gorgeous even when she is dispirited. And I mean this in a good way. She takes every opportunity she can get and the labor shows. It is not an effortless performance.

The character offers her enough layers too - a woman who wants to do well in her career and is a decent human being too. But as it turns out, even if she is willing to put in her best, try everything within her control and resist from sinking low, it's not enough. And after all, she is a woman and thus is needy. There are other times, where Mahi behaves aggressively, over-reacts and takes actions the repercussions of which she hasn't taken into account.

Interestingly, the only really good looking actress in the entire clutter of 'top' heroines in Heroine is Mahi. The rest, aren't half as magnificent. Yet, she struggles as a 'star', if not a beginner. For a change, you also have the male leads in sensitive roles, who have their own shades of gray, however unbaked they are. None of the other side characters add any meaning to the film except for maybe Shahana Goswami's Promita.

With such textures, you'd hope the story would hold your interest. It meanders, it stretches, it disengages you from the characters. And towards the end it just gets overbearing. And at times, you feel like some sequences, especially ones revolving around sexuality, have been added just to titillate without much relevance to the story. The run-of-the-mill songs slow the film down too. The two and a half hours run-time doesn't help its case either.

There is this underlying equation that Madhur Bhandarkar seems to point at, which is annoying as his audience, because it comments about the audience. While belittling the hard-work that people put in their work, Heroine implies that the entire film industry lives in a cut-throat environment where manipulation is the key to success. They do it to so their films do well with the masses. And the masses supposedly decide the fate of a film depending on the controversy surrounding it. Full stop. There is no if or but there, the question about the film's quality or content is a distant one. The audience's love for their cinema is based solely on the associated scandals. And what is poor media to do but to report on these with dramatic effect if that's what the audience wants. !?!? Really? Is that what we are? Naïve and basically stupid.

Whatever.

What it all boils down to then is the same question we could ask about most Bhandarkar products – Is Madhur Bhandarkar's Heroine about "Bollywood - behind the scenes" or is it telling us the story of its heroine, her ups, downs and in-betweens? If its the former, you'd get more out of reading your city's daily edition let alone film magazines. And if it's the latter, atypically so, Bhandarkar doesn't engage despite having his heroine perform to the best of her capabilities.