Dark streets and dhotis.

 Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay created Byomkesh Bakshi in 1932, and continued to chronicle his adventures until 1970.  Initially, Byomkesh was closely modeled on Sherlock Holmes; he's an eccentric Bengali intellectual who solves crime through his powers of logic and observation, and is assisted by his loyal friend and roommate Ajit Bannerjee, who also chronicles his adventures.  Byomkesh quickly grows beyond Holmes pastiche, though.  He marries, has a son, buys a car, and develops his own eccentricities as the years pass.  One of his quirks is a dislike of the word 'detective', or worse, 'investigator.'  Byomkesh refers to himself as a Satyanweshi, a seeker of truth, so I don't think he'd approve of the title of 2015's Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!.  He would also be suspicious of the exclamation mark.

The movie opens in 1943 Calcutta. Byomkesh Bakshy (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a recent college graduate who already has a reputation for being extremely clever and kind of annoying.  That's why Ajit Bannerjee (Anand Tiwari) approaches him for help in finding his father, Bhuvan Bannerjee (no actor listed, because SPOILER he's dead and doesn't actually appear in the movie.)  At first, Byomkesh isn't interested, but his girlfriend (Moumita Chakraborty) just announced her engagement to someone else, and he really doesn't have much else to do, so finding a missing person it is!

 

Byomkesh starts his investigation by visiting the hostel where Bhuvan was staying, where he meets the brilliant Doctor Anakul Guha (Neeraj Kabi.)  After some intellectual jousting, Byomkesh finds Bhuvan's paan box, which is filled with cash, keepsakes, and Bhuvan's personal paan formula, which he called 'Calcutta Kiss.'  Byomkesh concludes that Bhuvanm has been murdered, and visits the now-abandoned factory where he used to work and runs into the factory owner's wife and the film's designated femme fatale, film actress Anguri Devi (Swastika Mukherjee).

 

And from there . . . well, it's a mystery, and I don't want to give too much away.  But Byomkesh crosses paths with a violent Japanese dentist (Taka Higuchi), a wealthy politician (Kaushik Ghosh) and his firebrand nephew (Shivam) and sensible niece (Divya Menon), and the notorious drug lord Yang Guang, a master of disguise, manipulation and stabbing.  (One might almost call him the Napoleon of Crime, but nobody actually does.)

 

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is not a direct adaptation of any of the Byomkesh Bakshi stories.  Instead, it draws elements from several stories, and then scales them up.  Byomkesh is still the same satyanweshi as before, but this time he's not just solving a clever murder, he's battling his own personal Moriarty in order to save Calcutta from utter ruin.  It's very pulpy, but played entirely straight rather than giggling at its own over-the-topness.

 

There are a lot of movies and TV shows about Byomkesh Bakshi, but it is a shame that, due to Sushant Singh Rajput's untimely death, we're never getting the sequel to this version.  It's a movie that earns its exclamation mark.

Retail therapy.

 When I first started blogging, being an American Bollywood fan was a bit more complicated than it is now.  Netflix had a decent selection of Bollywood DVDs available, but for the most part when you wanted new stuff you would find an online retailer, browse their catalog for something that looked interesting, and then . . . take your chances.  Sometimes the movie was good, sometimes it was terrible.  Sometimes the DVD had no subtitles.  Sometimes it turned out to be obviously and badly pirated.  It turned the movie watching experience into an adventure.

Things are different now.  There's an ocean of Indian cinema available at the literal push of a button, and rather than waiting weeks to finds out if a movie is any good, I can watch it right now.  It's great.  It's genuinely better than the old way of doing things.  But I do miss the sixty nine cent DVDs you'd pick up to round out an order; they had devotionals, mythologicals, duplicate movies, Z-movies, and the embarrassing early output of major stars.  These are movies that aren't easily available on streaming platforms, and while some of the DVDs are still out there, they cost a lot more than sixty nine cents, and they're very hard to find. 

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I am so happy to have maybe tracked down an affordable copy of Tum Mere Ho, the famously bad snake movie starring Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla.  Will the picture quality be any good?  Will the DVD have subtitles?  How bad can it possibly be?  I can't wait to find out.

Meanwhile, no new review this week.  I watched Awara Paagal Deewana, only to discover that I've already reviewed it.  You can read the old review here; I pretty much agree with Me From the Past.

My beloved is like lemonade.

 As Jab We Met (2007) opens, Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) is having a bad day, week, month and year. His father has died, the family corporation is struggling, he's locked in a very messy courtroom battle with his estranged mother (Divya Seth Shah), and his longtime girlfriend has married someone else.  Desolate, Aditya walks out of a meeting and just keeps walking, eventually finding himself on a train to Delhi.  Aditya contemplates throwing himself off, but he's interrupted by Geet (Kareena Kapoor), a fellow passenger who will not stop talking.

 

 Geet is persistent, even though Adityaa clearly wants to be left alone.  When he gets off the train during a late night stop, she follows.  And then she misses the train!  Geet is furious, and demands that Aditya escort her home to her family in Punjab.  Aditya agrees, because he's got nothing better to do and because he's kind of bemused by Geet, the dreamiest of manic pixie girls.

 

So, the pair make their way across India.  There are adventures.  More importantly, there are conversations.  Aditya tells Geet about his broken relationship, his broken family, and his broken dream of becoming a musician.  Geet tells Aditya about her very traditional Sikh family and her secret boyfriend Anshuman (Tarun Arora), who is not a Sikh and with whom she is planning to elope.By the end of the trip, Aditya obviously has a thing for Geet, but she's sticking with Anshuman, and in the spirit of compromise suggests that Aditya elope with her sister Roop (Saumya Tandon) instead, and then they can all go live in the mountains together.

 

When they arrive in Punjab, Geet''s family are initially suspicious of Aditya, but after she explains how he helped her they insist on him staying for a week so that they can thank him properly.  He has a wonderful time, but when Geet decides it's elopin' time, he still feels compelled to help her.  There's another roadtrip as the pair make their way to Manali, in the far northern part of India, but this time it's handled with a single song.  Once they reach Manali, Aditya says his goodbyes and walks away before Geet goes to meet Anshuman.

 

Aditya goes home and transforms his life.  He transforms the business into a major success, reconciles with his mother, and even takes up singing again, and everything he does, he does because of Geet.  "Your absence is like your presence," he sings; while he misses her, she's always in his heart, and that gives him the strength to carry on and live his best life.  And then, nine months later, Geet's family tracks him down and demands to know what he's done with their child, because the movie's only halfway over.

Many Bollywood movies will mix up the genres, combining romance with action and comic relief and magic realism.  This is the straight stuff, pure uncut Bollywood romance.  And it works, largely because of the characters.  Aditya is not only rich and handsome and talented, he's an astonishingly decent person, able to take no for an answer and still do everything possible to help the woman he loves without hoping for a reward.  He's very honest about his love for Geet, but he's quick to add, "But that's my problem."  (Of course Aditya gets the girl in the end, but when he does he is genuinely surprised.)  And Geet is free spirited and quirky in the first part of the movie but shifts believably to dour and cynical in the second.  It would be easy to make her into a caricature, but Kareena Kapoor presents her as a well rounded person with agency and dreams of her own, rather than as a motivation for Aditya's character development.  Jab We Met came out only four years after Kareena's widely panned (including by me) performance in Khushi.  The growth in her confidence and skill is remarkable.

 

While I love a good masala flick at least as much as the next guy (probably more) it's okay to just do one thing if you do it well.  Jab We Met does one thing really well.

. . . is an ungrateful stepsibling.

David Dhawan is famous for directing a number of incredibly broad, incredibly formulaic comedies, often starring Govinda or the director's son, Varun Dhawan, and with further comic relief provided by some combination of Shakti Kapoor, Johny Lever, Kader Khan, and/or Paresh Rawal.  The movies are sometimes tasteless, predictably predictable, and irregularly funny, but when you watch a David Dhawan movie, you know what you're getting.  And then there is his first hit, Swarg (1990).  While Govinda and Paresh Rawal both have important roles, this is perhaps the least David Dhawany David Dhawan movie I have ever seen.

 Kumar (Rajesh Khanna) is a wealthy businessman with a large family, including his wife Janki (Madhavi) and much younger stepsiblings Ravi (Dilip Dhawan), Vikram (Raja Bundela), and Jyoti (Juhi Chawla), along with Ravi's wife Naina (Neena Gupta) and maybe Ravi and Naina have a son?  A kid shows up in a few scenes, but nobody ever really talks about him.  When his stepmother was dying, Kumar promised her that he would always take care of her children, and even took a vow that he would never have children of his own, a decision that I am sure will have no negative consequences.

And then there's Krishna (Govinda), the family servant.  Krishna was an orphan, taken in at a young age, and he views Kumar as a father, showing so much devotion that he;'s in danger of overdosing on filial piety.  Krishna is not a very good servant, but he is clever, loyal, and good at punching bad guys, skills which he puts to good use when rescuing Jyoti from a fate worse than death.  (It is nineties Bollywood, after all; you have to threaten the heroine with a fate worse than death at some point.)

 

In any case, it's a big, wonderful, loving family and everybody is so happy that they named the house "Swarg," because it is a heaven on Earth.  And then, Kumar wins the election to become president of the Mill Owners Association.  His predecessor Dhanraj (Paresh Rawal) is not happy, because he's been using the position to fill his own pockets for years, and he knows the scrupulously honest Kumar will not let the matter go.  Dhanraj sets out to ruin Kumar's happy home.

 

And he does!  It turns out that ruining people is surprisingly easy.  With the help of Nagpal (Bharat Kapoor), one of Kumar's employees, he manipulates Kumar into using the mansion as collateral to secure a large loan, a loan which becomes impossible to repay when the factory burns down.

Kumar is ruined overnight, and his stepbrothers reveal themselves to be selfish jerks who refuse to help the man who has supported them for so many years.  (Jyoti is played by Juhi Chawla and so remains virtuous.)  When Krishna has had enough and confronts them over their disloyalty, they frame him for stealing Jyoti's jewelry and he is thrown out of the house.  

 

Krishna travels to Bombay (the name won't officially change for another five years) and after a rough start, he meets a friend named Airport (Satish Kaushik), gets a job as a spot boy on a movie set, and accidentally becomes a rich and successful film star almost overnight.  Now that he has money and power and a loyal sidekick, Krishna returns home, determined to save his family, or at least avenge his fallen master.

Despite the different genre, David Dhawan still doesn't do subtle; this is drama rather than comedy, but it's still incredibly broad.  Dhanraj has two identifiable personality traits: he's evil, and he likes to remind people that he's from Gujurat.  Krishna is virtue personified.  Kumar is bound by his vow, and suffers nobly.  After the first half hour, nobody really has a chance to be funny, which is honestly a bit of a waste since half the cast have strong comedic chops; Juhi Chawla is right there, people!

 

The end result reminds me of a scaled down production of King Lear, swapping some of the play's cosmic nihilism for brightly colored dance numbers, because drama or no drama, Govinda is going to dance.  It's definitely not what I was expecting from David Dhawan.

A shaggy fish story.

You might think that Maara (2021) is a movie about finding love, or the strength of a found family, or learning from the past in order to face the future, but don't be fooled.  It's much simpler than that.  This is a movie about stories.

A young girl named Paaru (Aaradhya Shree) is taking a long bus ride with her family, and she is bored.  Her mother and grandmother (Maala Parvathi and Seema, respectively) offer to tell her a story, but she doesn't want to listen to a story she's already heard.  A nun in the next seat over (Padmavati Rao) steps in and offers a story about an immortal soldier searching the world over for the fish that contains his soul.  Little Paaru is captivated, but before the story ends, her grandmother suffers a stroke, and the bus breaks down.

 

In the present, Paaru is not particularly interested in the groom her mother has picked out for her, so she leaves town.  For work.  She's a restoration architect, and she has aproject in a small coastal village.  But when she gets to the village, Paaru finds beautiful murals, all over town, depicting . . . well, it looks an awful lot like an immortal soldier searching for the fish that contains his soul.  

 

Paaru rents a house that belongs to the artist, a man named Maara (Madhavan.)  It is filled with Maara's art, including sketches of many of the villagers, which gives Paaru a place to start searching.  Nobody knows where Maara is now, but everybody has a story about him.  Paaru gets caught up in story after story, stories about a kind antique dealer (M. S. Bhaskar), an unhappily married thief (Alexander Babu), a depressed doctor (Sshivada), a wise prostitute (Abhirami), and a drunken pirate (Guru Somasundaram).  They are not always nice stories, touching on subjects such as suicide and child abuse, but Maara himself emerges as a decent man who helps people when he can.

 

Paaru and Maara nearly meet while he is performing one of his good deeds, rescuing a child from dire peril.  But they don't meet, and Maara goes about his business.  The film shifts over to Maara's perspective from time to time, which makes him less of a mystery to the viewer than he is to Paaru.  But the most important thing we learn about Maara is that he is also driven by a story he heard as a young man, a story told through an undelivered letter that a retired postman (Moulee) has carried with him for decades.

 

Ostensibly Maara is a love story, and there is love here, deep, passionate abiding love.  It just doesn't really involve the two leads; Paaru isn't chasing the man, she's chasing the story, while Maara is chasing a story of his own.  That does make them a uniquely well suited couple, but that's beside the point.  The story is the point. 

 

And the story ambles along at its own languid pace, backed by some stunning cinematography.  (Well done, Dinesh Krishnan, Karthik Muthukumar, and anybody else involved in the process!)  It takes its time, but is worth the journey. 

Ten hours of plot in a two hour movie.

Bada Dil Wala (1983) is the story of Amrit (Rishi Kapoor), a kind and trusting hotel singer, who is sent to prison for a crime he did not commit, framed by his dance partner Luska (Kalpana Iyer) and evil hotel security chief Bhagat Singh (Amjad Khan).  Amrit vows to leave prison and prove his innocence.  The first step in his plan is to . . . work hard and earn an early parole.  Once that's sorted, and with the help of Luska's long lost sister Shabnam (Aruna Irani) he tricks the villains into confessing on tape.  Unfortunately, Bhagat has a gun, and in the ensuing struggle, Luska is shot.  And all of that happens within the first thirty minutes, with enough time for two dance numbers along the way.  Things happen, is what I am saying.  This movie has a lot of plot.

 

Amrit is afraid of being charged for Luska's murder, so he goes on the run.  Luckily, the first person he runs into is his friend Vijay (Vijay Arora), along with Vijay's wife Juhi (Sarika) and their toddler Munna (Babloo.)  Vijay delivers some important exposition about Juhi's father Sinha (Pran), who assumed that Vijay was after his money and refused to meet Vijay or even look at a picture of him, forcing the young couple to elope.  Juhi sensibly sent her father a picture of his grandson, and they're all taking a train ride to reunite the family.

And then the train derails.  Amrit manages to save little Munni, but Juhi and Vijay are not so lucky.  Amrit takes the boy to Sinha, but the old man assumes that Amrit is Vijay, and before Amrit can explain, the family doctor takes him aside and explains that Sinha has a heart conditio0n and any further shock could kill him, so Amrit is forced to play along, tearfully reuniting with his friend's estranged father in law.

 

The bad news is that Sinha has another daughter, Rashmi (Tina Munim), and she has seen a picture of her sister's husband.  She tries to bait Amrit into revealing himself, but he is well prepared thanks to all the backstory from the train trip.  She finally confronts him , and he confesses everything, explains his motives, and shows her the letter he had written to Sinha to reveal the truth.  Rashmi convinces him not to confess, both for her father's sake and because she's started to like him.  

And so Amrit sticks around and tries to make himself useful.  He keeps Simha happy and involved in family life, cleans up the corruption at the family juice factory, and grows closer to Rashmi.  He can't bring himself to start a relationship with her, though, because he's an impostor and a wanted fugitive and everybody thinks he's her brother-in-law.  It's enough plot for two movies at least.

 

And then Juhi shows up!  With amnesia!  Accompanied by a "doctor" who is actually Bhagat Singh in disguise!  And the movie is only halfway over!  

 

More than anything else, Bade Dil Wala reminds me of a penny dreadful, or an old black and white serial.  Our pure-hearted protagonist careens from event to event at a breakneck pace.  There's no time to explore anything in any great detail, or even catch a breath, but there is always something happening.  It's pure melodrama, with action and romance and literal cliffhangers.

 

Melodrama only works if the cast is willing to commit, and the cast commits.  Pran does most of the emotional heavy lifting; at times it seems that the only reason he's not in on the various secrets is so that he can react to the big reveals.  Amjad Khan, most famous for playing the villainous Gabbar Singh in Sholay, is if anything even nastier here.  Gabbar Singh, bad as he was, never tossed a baby off a cliff!  Rishi Kapoor's Amrit is a charming innocent, while Tina Munim's Rashmi is the smart one with nerves of steel.  There's a nasty villain to boo, and heroes to cheer for.  What more could you ask for?

(Oh, and the baby is fine.)

Lemony Snicket's "A Fistful of Dollars."

Avane Srimannarayana (2019) starts with a murder.  Bandit leader Rama Rama (Madhusudhan Rao) has captured a band of traveling religious pageant actors because he believes that they stole a truck load of gold, and he wants it. The actors won't, or can't, tell him where the gold is, so he shoots them all, apart from the hapless bandmaster (Gopalkrishna Deshpande), whom he keeps around as a sort of mascot or court jester.

 

Years pass.  Rama Rama is on his death bed, and his men have gathered to hear who will be the next leader of the bandit clan.  Rather than passing the throne (there's a literal throne, but it's made of wood and just looks like an uncomfortable chair) on to his scary, violent son Jayarama (Balaji Manohar) or his devious and ruthless son Tukaram (Pramod Shetty), Rama Rama declares that the throne will pass to whoever manages to find the lost gold.  This goes about as well as you would expect, and soon a maimed Tukaram has been sent into exile, while Jayaram has seized power, claiming to act as regent for his dead father until the gold has been recovered.

More years pass.  Jayaram rules the bandit clan with an iron fist, crucifying the occasional bandit that questions his authority.  Tukaram is a politician, using similar methods but with a thin veneer of legitimacy.  They both want the treasure, which means they are both pressuring Inspector Srimannarayana (Rakshit Shetty) to find it for them.  

 

Srimmanarayana is probably not a very good cop; he spends a little too much time in bars, and isn't likely to take a case unless there's something in it for him.  On the other hand, when he wants to be, he's a brilliant detective, and he's very good at punching people as well.  Srimmanarayana is ably assisted by Constable Achyuthanna (Achyuth Kumar) and frequently annoyed by plucky but kind of bossy small town reporter Lakshmi (Shanvi Sristavasta).

 

All of which sounds pretty standard.  There are dueling bad guys, a dashing scoundrel, a prim love interest, and a shiny macguffin, and everybody has their own agenda, including and especially our hero.  But that's because I haven't mentioned Cowboy Krisna's, an exact replica of a Western saloon owned by an eccentric cattle magnate, where you can hire a team of hyper-competent cowboy-themed mercenaries using a convenient letterbox.

 

And then there's the secret society of actors, who lead mundane lives in town during the day, but at night they secretly dress up in costume and perform theatrical rituals in the woods, preparing for the day when their prophesied savior will arrive and help them perform their last play so that they can finally move on to the next town.

 

What I am saying is, this is a weird movie.  It's not just a bombastic, over-the-top action movie, it's also a whimsical, surreal comedy.  Or it's not just a whimsical, surreal comedy, it's a bombastic, over-the-top action movie.  Either way, it mangles genres boundaries with glee, and the end result is as charming as it is strange.