logo

Rajkumar Santoshi has made several films that address social issues in a certain way. His celebrated films - Ghayal, Damini, Ghatak, Pukar, Lajja – carry strong messages, feisty characters and dialogues that get a good share of so called “front benchers’”claps and whistles. As we are no less eager to champion films with their ‘hearts in the right place’, these films have often found their share of audience and acclaim.

In his latest flick, Halla Bol (possibly returning to safer grounds after the failure of Bachchan-starrer and gangster drama, Family), Santoshi takes on a number of high profile crimes to highlight corruption and public apathy. Enthused by the extraordinary public interest and support in Jessica Lall murder case, he promotes public outcry (Halla Bol) as a panacea for all ills. This is problematic premise to say the least; however, does the film bear out what it has set out for itself? No. The reliability of the masses is questioned in the film itself when they are incited into protests and violence by a corrupt politician and his goons. The film does not even pretend to show how any mechanism of public involvement can be created (surely, amateur street theatre is not enough), debates held and the public won over for action. Of course, this leaves out any possibility for addressing finer issues, for e.g. how ‘neta’ and ‘janta’ necessarily cannot be tightly compartmentalized into two separate entities, for many amongst this ‘janta’ would be as corrupt if in power. The problems in premise, not surprisingly, spread neatly into the quality of the film.

The first half hour has all the ingredients of a B-film – from the opening scene between the biographer and Sameer Khan (Ajay Devgan), to the dismal item number, to the caricatures of real-life characters (Vijay Mallya?, Sri Ravi Shankar?) in their sad get-ups, to a murder straight from a horror fick, and a z-grade montage of Sameer Khan’s personal and professional exploits, not to forget strange expository set of dialogues between Jackie Shroff and Mukesh Tiwari.

Just when the film would have reached the point of no return, Pankaj Kapur does a superman, and, within a span of two earthy lines, that he drums out while performing a street play, he, single-handedly brings the film back into the game. As one watches him sing the Harishchandra fable, it is a different cinema from what we started with. From then on the Halla Bol goes into highs and lows but manages to stay away from the initial (with-great-potential-for-straight-to-video) debacle.

A major problem with Halla Bol is how the protagonist Sameer Khan is sketched out. The reversals in his character, from an idealist to a “practical” person and then back to an idealist position, are dealt with superficially. From a theatre actor who cries when his teacher gives him a tiny steel trophy to a superstar who cheats, lies, exploits young actresses and insults the same teacher, and then returns to being a righteous person who sacrifices fame and his career to fight for one wronged girl – Sameer Khan shows no psychological depth. If you are championing his cause it is because you came to the theatre already convinced of civil rights and not because the protagonist persuades you to. How can he? Khan is more a picture of weakness once he takes the right cause – he is often crying, pleading with other witnesses, or trying to protect his family with a miniature ‘kataar’, and for some reason stupidly standing with his wife (Vidya Balan) and child just behind the main door of his otherwise huge mansion as rioters threaten to bring it down. The boldest, bravest thing Sameer Khan can do is piss in his enemy’s house (which makes his enemy pull down the entire structure; it is difficult to say which one of them is more absurd?).

The dialogues have a retro feel to them, with an alliteration that would shame Kader Khan, and are spoken in a theatrically frontal composition. The film has been cut to a false pace and several quick, superficial scenes race through, that hinges either on a fake punch line, or an odd plot twist. Add to this several poorly planned and executed scenes (no, we are not done with B-film elements yet): there is Kill Bill-esque swordfight between some goons and Pankaj Kapur (somewhat saved by the latter’s concluding expression), or the lathi charge on Sameer Khan with strangely dancing police and media figures, or for that matter the ‘summary execution’ of the culprits in the end (a variety of “going kaput” expressions are played out by half a dozen antagonists as guilty verdicts are pronounced on them – I suspect, in time to come, they will be appended together for one of the bakra awards on MTV).

I sincerely invite Rajkumar Santoshi to create something as delightful as Andaz Apna Apna. As for the reason why most of these ‘social issues’ films can’t come up with attractive, workable solutions, I have a theory – because they fail to identify the problem. Only with clarity on the real problem will come the right or at least reasonable solutions. And it is not my place to help them with that.

- Padmaja Thakore