Not every bearded filmmaker is Steven Spielberg and our
wannabes should wake up to that fact.
Kabir Khan, while sporting a Shaggy-style beard, different
from the great man’s trademark muzzle, tries his hand on a premise that would
have suited early, eighties-era Spielberg- a film about sensitive political
issues, a sprightly comic adventure set in a seemingly hostile and unwelcoming
land and most importantly about a little child at the center of it all.
Yet, even the weakest of Spielberg films are made
compellingly watchable either by the director’s firm sense of realism (as in
the flawed yet pretty light-hearted ‘The Terminal’) or a sweeping, if
self-deprecatory sense of wonder (as in ‘Hook’). ‘Bajrangi Bhaijaan’- a
well-intentioned plea for secularism disguised as a Bollywood entertainer (read
as tearjerker)- sees Khan, hitherto an uneven stylist- whose films are
awkwardly trapped between their weighty ambitions and the simple aims of
entertainment- in solid, confident form but despite much going for it, it is a
film which lacks both a reassuring sense of coherence as well as the kind of
genuinely rollicking old-school allure that would have drawn us in.
The result, nevertheless, is a safe, harmless Bollywood
entertainer, inoffensive to the point that its normally larger-than-life hero-
Salman Khan, who else- is palpably restrained (which is good indeed) and much
of the film’s talk of secularism, border tensions and so on is reduced to
simplistic, sloppy plotting and a conveniently please-all climax. Sigh.
It starts off promisingly indeed- like all Khan films- in a
territory that he is most comfortable with- when he is required to add in
welcome touches of documentary-style credibility to the proceedings. We begin
in the frosty hills of Pakistan, where a family sits huddled watching a cricket
match and applauding the stellar Shahid Afridi as he bags them a victory. A
pregnant mother makes a wishful resolution, the result is an irresistibly sweet
girl named Shahida, with a face the color of snow. Taken along with her anxious
mother to Nizammuddin Auliya behind Indian lines so that she can be able to utter
a word, Shahida’s curiosity gets the better of her on the homeward bound-
inevitably, as it should happen, she is stranded in a seemingly alien India and
as we know, this sweetie cannot ‘phone home’.
Of course, with a Spielberg-like breeziness, Khan lets the
little girl set her troubled, exquisitely wide eyes at an unlikely escort in
the midst of a frenetic paean to Lord Hanuman- a thick-headed simpleton called
as Pavan Kumar Chaturvedi, who happens to be a rather naïve devotee for the
said deity. Make no mistake however- this is Bollywood formula at its
cheesiest- what follows is a strictly serviceable routine of proceedings-
blending the regular trappings of candy floss romance, predictable humor and
the usual tomfoolery that we have seen in so many Salman Khan-starrers in the
yore. It hardly feels like a film coming from a seasoned documentary pro like
Khan and it is evident in these hoary, if often harmless, plot movements that
the director just is not cut for masala.
What makes these uninspired stretches work is, for most part,
the man himself. It is nicely refreshing to see Salman shed off the
self-aggrandizing, pompous and celebratory essence away and instead play the
dim-witted Simple Simon to the hilt without every overplaying the ridiculous
decisions that his character makes. His is a refreshingly simple character,
thrust unwittingly into responsibilities that he has no intention to be. It is
largely due to him- and Khan’s attention to a few nice nuanced touches- a
staunchly Hindu household in which the kid presumably watches ‘Chhota Bheem’
and where the patriarch frowns on neighbors being meat-guzzling Muslims- that
the film’s lazy first half is pretty much watchable- even as a silly song about
chicken and an even more ridiculous fight inside a brothel
Post interval, the film crackles up nicely enough- with our
foolhardy, Hanuman-worshipping hero tugging along little Shahida across the
border and things enliven nicely with the arrival of Nawazzudin Siddiqui as the
news scavenger Chand Nawaz, a character so full of pluck and rippling
earnestness that he alone lifts the film from its hitherto labored pace. Khan
himself does a neat job of capturing the mofussil flavor of the locations-
lensman Aseem Mishra does a fabulous job of shooting the sandy streets, the
loaded camels and the barren highways while the tone becomes crisply comic in
nature- resulting in some well-earned sequences of full-blown entertainment and
charming adventure.
To be more honest, the entire film is amply lifted by the
little Shahida herself. Played by an effervescent yet effectively earthy
Harshaali Malhotra, this little, knee-high damsel in distress is the film’s
high point- its apex and obviously Khan’s best decision as a director. As long
as the film fixes its starry, besotted gaze on this little wonder, it literally
soars, accompanied with a subtle, sweeping background score and the precocious
Malhotra herself- acting out her predicament, her glee and her plucky
bubbliness with effective balance. Here is a child performer to watch out for
and it won’t be surprising if other mainstream films feature her for the
tear-jerking- for her essence herself is enough to make one go weak at the
knees.
Somewhere inside the ungainly mess of mainstream clichés- a
boring and dull romance between Pavan and Rasika (a surprisingly bland Kareena
Kapoor Khan) and some ham-fisted, emotionally manipulative scenes in the way-
lies an inert film, a smaller, more intimate story of Pavan and Shahida- a yarn
that simply and rather effectively spans their obvious geopolitical differences
and unites them in a well-intentioned knight and damsel tale. A more able
director would have teased this smaller story out, ignoring the weightier
aspirations but nah, Khan decides to pad them along- even as they begin to look
even more unconvincing. For this is a film that is unwisely trying to sound
like a plea for secularism between both the nations but it hardly has the
narrative heft to warrant such naïve ambition.
For once again, Khan hardly adds any real stakes to this tale.
There is no real threat, no real sense of peril or danger in
Pavan’s single-minded quest. Border guards are easily and ridiculously won over
by the man’s earnestness and in typical Bollywood fashion, one of them, who
normally looks the sternest, allows him to enter without documents, easily
impressed with the intentions. Throughout the cross-border comic chase, the
pursuers turn out to be blundering uniformed fools and Rajesh Sharma’s
slap-happy cop, desperately hunting for these wild geese, is suddenly
transformed into an all-so-wonderful guy towards the inevitable climax.
This is something of a shame since there is so much potential
in a film like this. Unlike most Salman Khan-starrers, it is slick, nicely shot
and also nicely cast with fine actors finally doing what they can do best.
Sharat Saxena is reliably gruff as a believably stern patriarch, Om Puri shows
up in a delightfully old-school cameo as a warm-hearted maulvi offering refuge
to the fugitive Pavan and there are a couple of good bits, here and there.
Mostly, Malhotra’s bubbly grace and Siddiqui’s heartfelt energy drive the
proceedings, aided by Khan’s flair for some nice local flavor. But with so much
of the film’s politics dumbed down to just stray moments of some little insight
and a handful of clever, thoughtful lines, much of this is again elaborate, if
somewhat flab-free, window-dressing.
A major Bollywood critic- one often lambasted for ripping
apart wildly popular films- compared ‘Bajrangi Bhaijaan’ to the style of Rajkumar
Hirani and I beg to differ. Hirani’s films might be ham-fisted soliloquies on
religion, education and institutions- with more stretched farce than
intelligent satire on display- but the writer-director also hammers hard at
valuable insights with wacky scripts and memorable characters. There is none of
this in Khan’s film- even as he and writer S. Vijayendra Prasad (the man who
wrote the ‘Baahubali’ behemoth) amp up the tear-jerker element quite
effectively in many key scenes.
‘Bajrangi Bhaijaan’ is a safe yet unspectacular entertainer-
a film which remains quite watchable for most part and often sweet but if only
it had been just a bit complex, a tad more involving and not merely chose the
easy way out…..
My Rating- Three Stars Out Of Five.
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