For a long time, I believed that Steven Spielberg had made 'Back To The Future'.
On the covers of DVDs on the shelves of any music store in my boyhood, I could see it printed clearly 'Steven Spielberg Presents: Back To The Future'. It was only in my adulthood that I had watched the actual film that the truth, the essential difference between the bearded director who refuses to come of age and Robert Zemeckis, hit me hard between my eyes. Compare the rollicking, freewheeling Boy's Own zing of Spielberg's 'Indiana Jones' series to Zemeckis' infusion of unabashedly adult themes in 'Back To The Future' (for instance, that bit in which Marty McFly is seduced by his own mother) and you will know the difference.
Zaniness, especially of a cinematic variety, feels both more ridiculous and delicious when the silly charades are splashed suddenly with a dash of realism to ground the proceedings into reality, the Neverland of imagination contrasted suddenly with the harsh world just beyond the woods. It would be difficult to imagine the pure thrill of 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark' without its Nazi villains of the World War 2 backdrop; similarly, time travel would not be as whimsical if it did not involve its own share of side effects.
Anurag Basu understands that essential truth but while his latest film built around that crux, of mirroring satire with farce, of moments of wit with pure nonsense, 'Jagga Jasoos', starting off with tremendously self-assured confidence, stumbles quite a lot in its desperate yet ambitious bid to maintain that crucial balance. The effort shows and in not quite a good way, for this could have been a lot tighter, spikier and smarter film but then, there is the relentless drive and ambition to admire.
For, while he often tends to get a bit too lost in the fictional, highly stylised alternate universes that he creates, one has to credit Basu for being something of a solid storyteller. 'Jagga Jasoos' has a hell of a start, with parachutes literally dropping out of an austere sky and marking a sensational scandal that actually did take place in the real world we know. And we are scooted off from the present day, with a young pulp fiction hero's adventures being narrated by a leggy bespectacled dame who seems to know more than that, to the flashbacks when we are introduced to the same titular hero and his brave and boisterous exploits.
Born as a destitute and growing up as a boy with nurses and doctors, who too seem to be crooning about his effervescent charm, little quiet Jagga encounters a mysterious butter-fingered soul by the name of Bagchi (played marvellously by the talented Saswata Chatterjee), who takes him under his wing and teaches him to open his mouth by the way of song and thus, raises him like his own son.
However, while the film has its heart in the right place and the charm and whimsy feel both picaresque and sublime by turns, it will take some time for an average viewer to be accustomed to 'Jagga Jasoos', especially in the unabashed, even reckless, way it celebrates its musical and theatrical origins. The device of narrating Jagga's action-packed and appropriately swashbuckling adventures like a series of Tintin comics read orally sounds fine but often interrupts the pace and imagination when they are in full flow. On the other hand, the Basu often makes his lead character, who grows up to a taciturn and fiendishly smart cocky town sleuth, break into song every now and then. It is not a bad thing, per se; Jagga is naturally a charming, a hypnotically plucky hero who can conjure up wonderful limericks to explain the whole mystery but his sing-song ramblings, while penned ingeniously by Amitabh Bhattacharya (especially the one about a particular Miss Mala) and composed with orchestral swells by Pritam, do slow down the plot.
None of that is a big bother, thanks to Basu's brilliant casting decision. Ranbir Kapoor has played the quirky, bushy-tailed hero before too to splendid results but here, as the endearing Jagga, he is operating at the peak of his almost organic boyish charm and split-second spontaneity. It is a tough role to pull off, being handed a big bulk of words and rhymes to sing out to explain the plot and also made to stutter when at a loss for words but it is always admirable to see the young yet seasoned performer take on it with pure gusto. There is something intriguing about the way he stares back at us through those glasses, something innocent about the way he gazes with admiration at his unlikely sidekick and something adorably naughty about the way he tries to steal a kiss from the same. And to watch him use his stuttering pauses to create those marvellous beatboxing tunes is just too much fun.
It is a bit unfortunate that the said partner turns out to be Katrina Kaif's Shruti Sengupta, a character who is clearly a journalist but is particularly hard to believe in or root for. Kaif looks fine enough but her absolutely one-dimensional befuddlement at the chaos around her lets down the film's potential for more laughs, though Basu takes care to make her enough of a genuinely bumbling bimbo to make it passable enough.
Wisely enough, a lot of the narrative thrust is given to Jagga's quest for his foster father Bagchi but while the film does an admirably neat job of keeping the emotions on an even keel, you can feel the pressure on Basu and his crew to keep the whole thing crackling with comic electricity. Film and literary references are aplenty, from Bagchi's grainy video-taped birthday wishes looking like Bob Balaban's weather reports in Wes Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom' to a tense moment in a fast and furious Ferris Wheel that mirrors the frenetic carousel climax of 'Strangers On A Train' and then there are the obvious references to wonderfully preposterous entertainers and potboilers of yore: the North African chase set-pieces of Steven Spielberg , the puzzling small-town mysteries from Satyajit Ray's Feluda stories and so on.
They are all done well; Basu seems to have moved on clearly from just referencing video clips from YouTube to understanding the films that inspired him in the first place; he also names a fictional location in the film after a similarly fictional kingdom in a wildly fantastic yarn made by a true auteur. And as usual, his flair for visual humour is better than ever (a casually indifferent policeman fumbles with too many telephones on his desk and the MacGuffin of a tape touted to contain important information turns out to be only a simple birthday message) and he is fully confident with the cock-eyed quirk that a film this preposterous needs. Cinematographer S. Ravi Varman is having a blast here, shuttling the adventure from misty hill-towns to secret river tunnels to the sun-baked North African ghettoes to even the vivid, jaw-dropping desert vistas where ostriches sprint and giraffes loom like skyscrapers.
There is nearly no limit to 'Jagga Jasoos' when it comes to imagination and loose creativity. It is just that it could all have been a lot more smart than just being spectacularly silly. The first half, while effortlessly breezy, stumbles on its own episodic nature. The second half ratchets up expertly the action and the wall-to-wall anarchy and invention (at one point, a Russian circus train and even a Blofeld-like kingpin are introduced at the same time) but it all starts feeling a bit too rushed and half-baked, so that we never really get everything explained. And at times, the unashamed silliness just does to live up to the brilliance elsewhere.
And yet, even with such flaws, I found myself at the end of 'Jagga Jasoos' grinning more widely than ever. There are bits and pieces here that elevate the film to a whole new level, bits and pieces that I wish the film had more of. Smartly tacking on a sub-plot of an international conspiracy that creates terrorism and war, 'Jagga Jasoos' hits closer home at resonance than any other blockbuster can do and even if it is inconsistent, it is admirable to see the story strutting cockily, like its own hero, from being just an old-school detective comedy full of pratfalls to being something wildly unconventional or even uncommercial. This might be Basu's mix-masala version of Indiana Jones and Tintin and those broadly comical Hollywood musicals (think 'Cat Ballou' or even any one of the stuff by Disney and Pixar) but it is also eerily like one of Thomas Pynchon's more baggy yet brilliant post-modern novels, blending political intrigue with sheer, larger-than-life farce. There are also beautiful and hilarious touches here that really got under my skin. The way Bagchi names himself Tutti Futti, not for sweetness, but rather for his bad luck and broken bones. Or in Saurabh Shukla's delightfully slimy officious bloodhound Sinha who chooses to relax in a Turkish bath while discussing shady intelligence, or in the way a bunch of North Africans are flummoxed over quite how the accident-prone Shruti could fall off from a staircase. Or my favourite scene from the film, in which both Jagga and Sinha face off with their choice of improvised rhymes and lyrics to devastatingly hilarious results.
'Jagga Jasoos' is, thus, a properly zany film, a cinematic experience so unhinged and even disorderly that it can be called ridiculous. But in between the splendid mess, there is such breathtaking intelligence and such breakneck daredevilry that you can lap it up deliciously. It promises us a sequel in that shockingly, unexpected climax and while it is too long to be an effective origins film, this is still the kind of nutty, madcap mayhem that I would love to sink into again and again.
My Rating: 3 and a half stars out of 5
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