Pushpak (Srinivasa Rao, 1988)
IMDB Link

I spent around twenty minutes looking for subtitles for the movie until I read somewhere on the net that the film did not have any dialogue.

An Indian film without any dialogue? That sounds absurd! Silence has never exactly been a Bollywood trait, so it did not cross my mind that a 1988 film was made without dialogues! Strange.

The film is comedy and for a while the film is pure gold. We are introduced to a university graduate, who is unemployed, and very poor. Some of initial scenes were hilarious. The man cannot afford to pay for a full cup of tea, so he only gets half a cup, and he drops in buttons and other junk in it, to raise the level of the drink, to make it appear full.

Eventually, the film goes for its main plot. The man finds a millionaire drunk on the roads, so he takes him home, and ties him up. He then uses the millionaire’s hotel key and lives in the hotel room, and uses the millionaire’s money to change his life. In the process he falls in love with a magician’s daughter and is followed by a hitman that is mistaking him for the millionaire. At a length of more than two hours, the film tries too much. Even a no-dialogue Indian film seems to fall in Indian cinema’s biggest mistake, which is trying to put too much in a film.

By cutting out the dialogue, the movie would have benefited from some other restraints. The hitman subplot could have been completely removed and the film probably had 45 minutes of it chopped off, and the finished good could have been a timeless comedy. Unfortunately, it’s not.

3/5



Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (Banerjee, 2008)
IMDB Link

The film works purely based on Abhay Deol’s depiction of the character of Lucky. Lucky is a mastermind thief that can steal anything.

But wait, the way I wrote it, makes it seem like he is a breaking into banks and museums, using cool techniques and gadgets, and going after rare diamonds or paintings. No, no, Lucky steals cars from the roads and stuff from people’s houses. He does it all the old-fashioned, simple ways. Jumping over walls.

But what makes Lucky so fascinating and successful is his charm and confidence. His boyish, angelic look does not people suspicious and he uses that to his advantage. He does not sneak around, hiding in the dark and being stealthy. He does it all in the open, easily walking in and out of houses, and I like it because it rings true. If one walks out of the house, in the light of day, holding a TV, no one will think that the person is stealing it. It’s just too normal for it to be criminal, and Lucky does all his acts with such calmness and gentleness about it, that it is easy not to be suspicious.

Lucky became a successful thief, but with his attitude and style, he could have been good at almost anything. Well, we might not notice someone like Lucky robbing us blind, but let’s at least keep an open eye to films like this, and not allow it to pass us by.

4/5



Gulaal (Kashyap, 2009)
IMDB Link

Its political themes, messages, and questions it raises are brilliant. As a film, it mostly fails. And that’s “Gulaal”, the equivalent of an intellectual writing a political book, might be brilliant in its ideas, but a shitty read.

The problem with “Gulaal” is you can feel it straining under its multiple sub-plots and characters and ideas, and while some directors are able to balance them out well, Anurag Kashyap is not one of them.

The film is about a political royalist group that wants to regain power in India. Dileep rents a room in a hostel as he is joining university to study law. Dileep is a mild-mannered, young man and soon becomes part of the circle of the political group. He is surrounded by shady politicians that are using him and others for their own political gains and rivaled against another political group of people that are as corrupted as they are. Both groups will go to any lengths to make sure they gain some success in the democratic system.

Director Kashyap fails mainly with his handling of Dileep. The film is supposed to be about him, given the focus he is given towards the end, but the film loses focus, and never really develops him, so his transformation and character decisions he takes never really clicks with me.

With the current political situation in Iran, a lot of what was said in the film sounded familiar to me, and I was very much impressed by its strong messages. But it just needed to have a stronger handle on its character and allowed them to develop more and maybe then the film would have turned out better.

3/5