That's So Maasha!

 Gulaebaghavali (2018) is a farce in which a charming gang of misfits compete with vicious criminals to retrieve a fortune in diamonds.  That's a surprisingly common synopsis in Indian cinema, practically a subgenre, and they always seem to end the same way, with a desperate but silly struggle between competing factions for the diamonds.  Still, there's always room for  a twist.

This time, the fortune in diamonds is buried under a tree just outside of a temple in the village of Gulaebaghavali.  Corrupt businessman Sampath (Madhusudhan Rao) wants it; it was buried by his grandfather, who had stolen them from a shady foreigner during the British occupation of India.  The village is full of superstitious and well-armed locals, though, so to retrieve the diamonds Sampath is going to need help.  Expendable help.

Munish (Ramdoss) is an easy recruit; he works for Sampath's gangster brother-in-law (Anandraj), so he only has to be told what to do.  Badri (Prabhu Deva) is a little more complicated; he's a swashbuckling thief and statue smuggler who stumbles across Munish and company during their initial attempt to retrieve the diamonds.  Badri is stealing a statue at the time, but has to take a break in order to rescue a damsel in distress, accidentally foiling Munish's plans in the process.  Sampath's men capture Badri and confiscate his statues, but he's offered a great deal of money just to retrieve the chest.  (They do not bother to explain what is in the box.)

And then there's the damsel.  Viji (Hansika Motwani) is an attractive young woman whom Badri met at a nightclub and utterly failed to make an impression on.  After her driver makes a crude pass, Viji gets out of the car and starts walking down the creepy Indian rural road, accidentally stumbling across a local performing a naked ritual.  She's captured by the villagers, who now want her to perform the ritual, but she escapes when Badri makes his clumsy rescue attempt.  Then she is promptly captured by Sampath's men.

The plan is for Viji to return to the village and perform the ritual, distracting the locals long enough for Badri and Munish to retrieve the box.  However, while driving to the village Munish crashes the car into a lamp post, then loudly starts talking about a confrontation with the police.  The trio leave the scene of the accident, and Munish explains that the car is bugged, and he is under orders to kill Badri and Munish once the box has been retrieved.  He doesn't want to do that, though, and suggests that instead they split the contents three ways.

Munish tries to hijack another car, but the car that he selects happens to be driven by middle-aged con artist Maasha (Revathi), who quickly proves her worth by rescuing the group from Badri's old associates (Yogi Babu and Mansoor Ali Khan.)  The bad news is that the group are down to a four-way split, but the good news is that Maasha is easily the most competent person in the entire movie.  And she has more than one car.  And a house they can stay at.  

Even with Maasha's help, though, they have a tough job ahead of them, as they are forced to evade angry villagers, three separate criminal gangs, and Police Inspector Mayilvaganam (Sathyan), who happens to have been conned by each of the quartet at one time or another.  

Badri is clearly supposed to be the hero here, and he certainly has all the qualities; he's brave, clever, and an excellent fighter, and his cynicism and greed masks the obligatory heart of gold.  But Maasha steals every scene that she's in, and eventually runs off with the entire movie, along with a few shiny things she noticed along the way.  She's even cleverer, enormously charming, and her greed and reflexive lying mask a heart of - well, it might be gold plated.  That's the twist.  Popular Indian cinema is often driven by testosterone, so it's a treat to see a woman run away with the movie like this.

A Study in Black and White

 Byomkesh Bakshi is the best known detective hero from Bengali literature, and Satyajit Ray is a legendary director, considered by some to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.  So Chiriyakhana (1967), featuring Bakshi and directed by Ray, has to be good, right?

It starts with a song.  Wealthy businessman and retired judge Nishanath Sen (Sushil Majumber) overhears a melody that he remembers form a movie that he watched years ago.  He wants to know the name of the song, the movie it came from, and the actress and singer, and since Google hasn't been invented yet he turns to the famous detective Byomkesh Bakshi (Uttam Kumar).  Because the detective business has been slow, Bakshi and Ajit (Shailen Mukherjee) happily accept the job, and also accept Sen's invitation to visit his estate and meet the eccentrics and reformed criminals living there.

Bakshi visits a film expert and learns the details that Sen wanted.  Most importantly, he learns that the song was sung by the actress, Sunaina, who was accused of murdering the producer's son and vanished soon afterwards.  He visits Sen's estate disguised as a Japanese horticulturalist (for reasons) to report his findings, and learns Sen's true motive for contacting him: Sen suspects that Sunaina is living on his estate in disguise.  Byomkesh agrees to help.

That night, Sen calls Byomkesh to tell him that he;'s discovered something very important that he can't reveal over the phone, and Byomkesh should return to the estate as himself so he can tell him.  However, Sen is murdered by an unknown assailant before the end of the phone call.

The next day, the police call upon the famous detective Byomkesh Bakshi to help solve the murder of retired judge Nishanath Sen.  They don't know that Byomkesh knew Sen, let alone that he'd been to the estate before, so he has a little fun showing off his deductive skills by dramatically revealing things that he already knows, but soon he's hard at work trying to figure out which of the estate's residents is a killer, just in time for the second murder.

Some of the more recent Byomkesh Bakshi movies have embraced a mix of pulp and noir tropes, with Byomkesh engaging in daring chases and meeting sultry femmes fatale.  Not this time.  Byomkesh and Ajit drink coffee and discuss love and literature while sifting through clues.  It's as much Agatha Christie as it is Arthur Conan Doyle, though the movie does have some fun with the Holmes influences, as multiple characters point out that Byomkesh and his faithful biographer bear more than a passing resemblance to a certain famous detective duo.

The movie is smart, but maybe too slow and stylish; the opening scene, in which Byomkesh answers a wrong number while the camera pans around the room to showcase the objects he's picked up on his many adventures sets the pace, and it's not a terribly quick pace.  And I'm not sure the reveal of the killer's motives quite holds together.  While the movie might meander, though, it looks fantastic, and Uttam Kumar's performance was good enough to earn the first ever National Film Award for Best Actor.

Advanced Buntys and Bablis

 2005's Bunty Aur Babli is one of my favorite movies; it's a giddy romp about a pair of golden-hearted con artists, a movie beautifully painted in shades of pink, driven by a gorgeous soundtrack and a series of ferocious dance numbers, and given life through the chemistry shared by Abhishek Bachchan and rani Mukherjee.  Naturally, I was intrigued by the trailer for Bunty Aur Babli 2 (2021), which shows the original pair leaving their retirement in order to track down a new pair of scammers who have assumed the Bunty aur Babli identities.  It's a fantastic premise for a sequel, but of course everything depends on the execution.

Vimmi (Rani Mukherji, as she spells her name now) and Rakesh (Saif Ali Khan, replacing Abhishek Bachchan) are law-abiding citizens leading a comfortable, if boring, small town life.  Rakesh is a ticket collector for the railway, while Vimmi is a housewife and devoted mother to their spoiled son Pappu (Agrim Mittal).  Looking at them, nobody would suspect that they were once the infamous Bunty and Babli, a pair of con artists who trekked across India scamming the rich and giving to the poor.

And then Bunty and Babli are back in the news, scamming a group of sleazy businessmen and leaving behind their famous calling card.  Police inspector Jatayu Singh (Pankaj Tripathi) knows Rakesh and Vimmi's secret, so he arrests the pair, but while they are in jail Bunyu and Babli strike again.  Jatayu realizes that they are dealing with a new Bunty and Babli, so he blackmails Vimmi and Rakesh into helping him capture them, though he's secretly planning to arrest all four Buntys and Bablis when he gets the chance.

Vimmi in particular is eager to protect the brand, so she and Rakesh get to work.  And while the movie wants us to think that they're out of shape has-beens, they actually catch Kunal (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Sonia (Sharvari Wagh), the new Bunty and Babli, in short order.  However, there isn't a lot of evidence and so Sonia and Kunal browbeat Jatayu into letting them go.  Rakesh and Vimmi figure out the next target and craft a plan to catch the new pair in the act, but Jatayu sidelines them at the last minute, and Sonia and Kunal get away with billions of rupees.  

Jatayu throws them off the case, despite the fact that he's the one who failed.  But now it's personal, and Rakesh and Vimmi decide to stop trying to act like the police, and instead tackle the problem as Bunty and Babli.  Cue training montage.

 

As good as the premise is, the actual movie is . . . flawed.  Part of the problem is that while the new Bunty and Babli are reasonably attractive and charming, we're not really given much reason to care about them.  In the original movie, Rakesh and Vimmi sang a whole song about their frustrated hopes and dreams before they even met.  We saw them try to do things the right way before drifting into scamming people, and we saw their relationship slowly develop.  Kunal and Sonia, on the other hand, arrive as a couple, already con artists, and we don't get much insight into their motivations until the every end of the movie, apart from the fact that Sonia is trying to raise money in order to launch an app she developed.

On the other hand, in the first movie, Vimmi and Rakesh were fun.  They spend much of the sequel as bickering, frustrated sad-sacks, even when they are doing much better police work than the actual police, and it takes far too long for them to get their groove back.  Some big dance numbers would help with the energy level, but there aren't any, at least until the closing credits.  We get jokes, but a lot of them fall flat.

Which is not to say that the movie is completely terrible.  The scams are fun. Rani Mukherji always has charm to spare, and I appreciate that Saif Ali Khan has embraced playing a middle aged guy lately.  But it's missing the drive and the heart of the original.  Bunty Aur Babli managed to capture lightning in a bottle, but the sequel is just trying to sell us the bottle.  Don't get me wrong, it's an okay bottle, but the lightning is missing.

No, really. It was in the preface to "Anna Karenina and the Terror of the Shooting Tsar."

 Leo Tolstoy once said that all superhero origins are alike, but every villain falls in his own way.  However, Tolstoy knows nothing about superheroes.  It's true that many superhero origin stories hit the same beats, but that's because they work.  A good story will take those familiar beats and make something that feels new, as Minnal Murali (2021) does.

Jaison (Tovino Thomas) seems like an unlikely candidate for superherodom.  He's a tailor in Kurukkanmoola, a village in small town Kerala, but he dreams of moving to the United States in order to earn enough money to win the hand of Bincy (Sneha Babu), daughter of the village's corrupt police Sub-Inspector Sajan (Baiju).  Bincy isn't willing to wait around, though, and becomes engaged to successful doofus Aneesh (Jude Anthany Joseph).  Jaison goes to her house to confront her while drunk and dressed as Santa Claus, and he's struck by lightning before Sajan can shoot him.

Meanwhile, tea shop employee Shibu (Guru Somasundaram) has spent most of his life pining after his childhood crush Usha (Shelley Kishore).  he's ecstatic when he learns that her marriage has collapsed and she and her young daughter are moving in with her brother Dasan (Harisree Asokan).  On a rainy Christmas Eve he paddles a boat out to catch a glimpse of Usha, and he's struck by lightning.

After a rough night, both men are fine.  Better than fine, really, because this is a superhero origin story.  Jaison learns that he's much faster and stronger, with superhuman hearing and perfect aim.  His nephew Josemon (Vasisht Umesh) explains the concept of superheroes to him, and they experiment with his powers.  Meanwhile he starts to get over Bincy, especially as he spends more time with "Bruce Lee" Biji (Femina George) a multiclassed travel agent/karate instructor who happens to be Aneesh's ex-girlfriend.

Shibu, meanwhile, gleefully experiments with his new telekinetic powers, and pointedly does not get over Usha.  He's as devoted as ever, despite her complete lack of interest, and uses his new abilities to terrify his boss after the man makes a crude pass at her.  

(Usha is an interesting character, because as written, she has very little agency, but that's the point; she has very little agency due to her situation.  She just wants to take care of her sick daughter, but she's practically besieged by unwanted suitors, all varying degrees of creepy, and she does not have any way to get them to leave her alone.  Of course, when Usha finally does get the chance to make a choice, it is a catastrophically bad one.)

When Jaison discovers that his adoptive father Varkey (P. Balachandran) was beaten by Sajan, he dons a disguise and crashes a school function in order to beat up basically the entire police force.  He signs his work, writing the name "Minnal Murali" on the wall before he vanishes.  On the same night, Shibu dons a much creepier disguise and robs the bank in order to pay for an operation for Usha's daughter.  The police and press believe that the bank robbery was also committed by Minnal Murali, and Shibu is happy to take advantage.  While Jaison is performing good deeds as Minnal Murali, Shibu is committing crimes while using the same identity.  

And then Usha makes her choice, and everything goes wrong.  Kerala gets an actual supervillain, and a true superhero must rise in order to stop him.

This is a superhero origin story, and it hits all of the expected beats.  The rural setting makes a difference, though, and that's not the only twist.  I don't think I've ever seen the hero and villain using the same identity before, for one thing.  And while Usha is very much trapped by circumstance, Biji has plenty of agency, never really winds up in the "hero's girlfriend" role, and is at least as important to saving the day in the final confrontation as Jaison is.  Ultimately, though, Minnal Murali is a good superhero story well told.