The Hindu : New Delhi News : A stunner from Hollywood, a surprise from Bollywood

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 31, 2006
ePaper

New Delhi

New Delhi

A stunner from Hollywood, a surprise from Bollywood

ZIYA US SALAM

BABEL

(At PVR Saket and other Delhi theatres)

Every man has his tale of grief. Every moment has its innocence. And every crime feeds off it. That is the lesson of this beautiful, hauntingly beautiful, film. It is a film for the memory bank. There is nothing shame-faced about it: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Babel" is a once-in-a-generation film that will probably take us another two generations to match.

The film has the chuckling quality of the poor who have not much to lose; it has the confident serenity of those for whom a solution is never more than a phone call away. It is so gently soothing, so imperceptible for the large part that you don't realise how each man's sorrow, so personal, so intimate, is also a sad song that finds reverberations across the world. From a speech and hearing-impaired girl in Japan to a poverty-stricken goat-herding family in Morocco to a trespassing maid in Mexico to an American couple in urgent need of medical aid. Only the notes change. The tune that emerges is the same: one of pain, no, angst. And the bonds born of sadness endure, so unlike the bonds made over a happy drink and loud cheers.

In the travails of the four seemingly disparate families comes a mirror for all of us: no man is an island in a world united by terror. Here a Japanese hunter gifts his gun to a Moroccan peasant. A stray gunshot by his son injures an American tourist. And fate joins all the stray elements into one string.

Inarritu's film takes off as a brilliant encapsulation of the silent beauty of the desert. Morocco looks beautiful in its poverty, in its sub-baked climes, in its sad hills. And at the end, Japan, with a lonely man in the middle of skyscrapers, seems so identifiable. So subtly does Inarritu pass on a message that we all are lonely in a crowd. In between, there is that American couple, victims of a stray gunshot. They don't speak the language of the locals in the desert. The locals don't understand much of English. The medical care is elementary at best. Yet they survive, thanks to the locals who do what they can, then refuse to put a price on their generosity. Another message comes through: human relationships are paramount; language, technology, everything is subservient.

Yes, "Babel" tells us the winds of change are screaming in our face this winter. All that we need to take off are our mufflers. And blinkers. The world is beautiful beyond blinkers. No rock stars, no singing sensations, no wonders of technology, Inarritu's bewitchingly subtle film is to be seen today so that you feel like a better human being tomorrow. It deserves each of the seven Golden Globes it has been nominated for.

I SEE YOU

(At PVR Rivoli and other Delhi theatres)

For years Arjun Rampal has been in the shadows. Even starring with the likes of Aishwarya Rai or Amitabh Bachchan has not brought him any limelight. So he goes and gets his wife to produce a film that actually is a bit of a surprise. The film has entered the halls without so much as a whimper. One entered the hall expecting a nice little cure for insomnia. But, hey, Rampal springs a surprise. Almost.

This tale of a man who can see a woman - ghost of a patient - while the world cannot is quite interesting in parts if quite avoidable in others.

The first part comes in the humour element, which seems natural.

The second comes in the avoidable organ sale track: the ghost is of a patient, herself a doctor, who fears her organs will soon be in the global organ market! Quite awful!

But the brightness of London scenery adds to the elegance of the sets: the hero, a TV anchor, has an apartment that has a reassuring balance between brightness and sobriety. And the girl, Vipasha Agarwal, looks beautiful the way girls are supposed to look in the multiplex-kind of films. She is no fair maiden. Quite dusky, hers is a cultivated beauty, easy on the eye, avoidable on the ears. Rampal, though, concentrates on looking good, and saying his lines the way the director asks him: no inputs, not an iota of personal energy. All this combines to give you a feeling that backed by a good director - Vivek Agarwal, who holds the directorial baton, is not up to scratch here - Rampal might just be able to deliver the goods. But that will have to wait for another day, and a nice roll of the dice. Here he has learnt everything by rote.

"I See You" may not be the film to round off the year, but it is not too bad a bargain if you keep your expectations low.

MUSEUM KE ANDAR PHANS GAYA SIKANDAR

(At Satyam, Patel Nagar, and other Delhi theatres)

In a unique case, Ben Stiller's "A Night at the Museum" has not been released in English across the country but only in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil!

It is the story of a man in charge of the graveyard shift at the natural history museum where all antique pieces come to life at night!

It includes, elephants, lions and monkeys, not to forget the 26th President of the U.S.! And what a wonderful job Kiran Kotrial has done with the original script, infusing local elements to draw genuine laughs, not just amused looks.

Voiced by Damandeep Singh, Anil Datt and Saurabh Agarwal, the dubbing loses nothing in comparison to the original.

What is sandpapered away is the foreign element, what is added is the local lingo. For instance, deriving from the success of Rajkumar Hirani's film, "Lage Raho Munnabhai", there is a reference to "Nannabhai" here.

Similarly, Himesh Reshamiya's "Aashiq Banaya Aapne" becomes "Nasik bulaya aapna".

All combining to keep the laughs flowing in this saga, which could have easily gone off-boil.

Here Stiller plays the lead, asked to guard the museum at night.

Little does he realise that the night shift does not mean a few yawns and snores interspersed with occasional walks.

Instead, he has to struggle for survival with a dinosaur, a lion, and what have you. Then he has to keep his job too: he has been out of work and unemployable for too long to sustain a family.

How he tricks the animals and his local tormentors while conquering his inner fears makes for an exhilarating spectacle.

Go for it. This Sikandar is uniquely delightful.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

New Delhi