My foot!

The Bollywood movies of the Nineties could get pretty wild, but Basant (1960) is a product of a different time, an age in which Shammi Kapoor and company could make sweet, uncomplicated romances that stick to a single genre throughout.  Nah, I'm just kidding - it gets pretty wild before the end.

Meenakshi (Nutan) is in love, but her stuffy, rich father Rai Bahadur (Murad) just doesn't understand, and he takes her to Calcutta by train in order to get her away from her paramour.  They argue, which mostly consists of them saying "My foot!" to each other at every conceivable opportunity.  During the night, Meenakshi sneaks away, hoping to catch a train to Bombay so that she can finally be with the man she loves, Rajesh (Pran).

If you know your Bollywood supporting actors, you know what a bad idea this is.  Pran had a long and varied career in which he played many different roles, but back in 1960 he was pretty firmly typecast as "Apparently rich jerk who needs money and has a thin mustache that makes him look like Evil Walt Disney."  Rai Bahadur is absolutely right to be concerned, though dragging your daughter to Calcutta is perhaps not the best way to handle the situation.

Before Meenakshi can get another train, her suitcase is stolen by Billoo (Johnny Walker), a surprisingly persistent petty thief.  She chases him to the circus, where she recovers her bag, discovers that her father has all the local police out searching for her, and performs a quick dance number onstage with out of work writer turned circus performer Ashim (Shammi Kapoor) in order to escape.

When she gets back to the train station, it's crawling with police.  She takes a bus, and winds up getting robbed again by Billoo.  Then the bus is boarded by police, and she's saved by Ashim, who pretends to be her overly possessive husband until the policeman leaves out of embarrassment.

And then it's road trip time!  They're both on the way to Bombay, and Ashim keeps helping Meenakshi, in part because he's just a decent guy who can't stand to leave someone in trouble, and in part because he thinks he can get a good story out of the adventure.  There are mishaps, they are pursued by Billoo, who wants the substantial reward Rai Bahadur is offering, and there's a great deal of bickering and "My foot!"s, but they also get to know one another a bit more, and we learn that Meenakshi is not so much spoiled as incredibly sheltered; Rajesh is pretty much the first man she's met outside of her father's supervision, and she's really more interested in freedom than suave, sinister mustaches.

And speaking of suave, sinister mustaches, Rai Bahadur is so desperate to find his daughter that he contacts Rajesh and tells him that he'll agree to the marriage, as long as Meenakshi comes home safely.  This suits Rajesh nicely, and he makes plans for the wedding, though he doesn't put any effort into finding his fiance.

By this point, Meenakshi and Ashim have inevitably fallen in love, though Ashim hasn't quite figured that fact out, even after Meenakshi asks him to take her home, rather than keep going to Rajesh's place.  It's only when they reach her front gate that she manages to explain the situation to him, using small words and a power point presentation.  They are in love!  It all sounds like a very sincere take on an old-school screwball comedy.  Actually, it sounds like a very sincere take on a specific screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, mostly because that's where they lifted most of the plot from.  But this is Bollywood, and there are always other genres to explore.  Time for a twist.

Ashim suggests that the spend a month apart, without contacting one another, in order to make sure that it's really love and not just infatuation brought on by an adventure in close proximity.  He has a point, given how she started her relationship with Rajesh, so they go their separate ways, promising to meet up again in a month.  What could go wrong?

Plenty.  At Meenaskhi's birthday party, Rai Bahadur announces her engagement to Rajesh.  Ashim is there in disguise (naughty Ashim), and immediately jumps to all the wrong conclusions.  They fight, they make up, they resume their separation, and the genres start flying fast and furious.

It's an adventure movie, as Ashim accepts a job to take a valuable necklace to a village in rural Assam, only to be robbed and apparently killed by Rajesh's men.  It's a melodrama, as Meenakshi crashes her car while speeding to the planned meeting with Ashim, only to end up in a wheelchair, her father dead of shock, and forced to depend on Rajesh and his passive aggressive protestations of disinterested love.  Then it becomes a Western?  Sure, why not?   Strict genre boundaries are a prison, and movies want to be free.

When Basant is a screwball comedy, it's pretty adorable.  Of course, it's lifted pretty directly from It Happened One Night, but when you steal you should steal from the best.  Shammi and Nutan have a relaxed and easy chemistry, and their escapades are fun rather than stressful.  It gives them plenty of time for character development, and that character development carries over into the chaotic second act, while Billoo transforms from annoying comic nemesis to annoying but genuinely useful sidekick.  It's still a chaotic mess, but it's a chaotic mess with heart.

No Jugni this time.

Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi (2018) is a very direct sequel to 2016's Happy Bhaag Jayegi, featuring many of the same actors playing the same characters, which is more unusual in Bollywood than you might expect.  Of course, it focuses on Happy and Guddu, the apparent leads of the previous movie, rather than Bilal and Zoya, the actually interesting characters.  Fortunately, the last movie's comic relief is along for the ride as well.

As the movie opens, Happy (Diana Penty) and Guddu (Ali Fazal) are happily married.  Guddu has received an offer to perform in Shanghai (for money, even!) so the young couple hop on a plane, not realizing that the scheduled performance is a trap.  Chinese gangster Chang (Jason Tham) has his men waiting at the airport to snatch the young couple, all part of a complicated and poorly thought out scheme to convince Bilal (The aptly named Sir Not Appearing In This Film) to hand over a contract to them by holding happy as hostage and sending Guddu to Pakistan as an intermediary.  The plane lands, and sure enough, Chang's men abduct Harpreet "Happy" Kaur.

The trouble is, they've grabbed the wrong Happy.  Harpreet "Happy" Kaur (Sonakshi Sinha) is a professor of botany who has arrived in China to take up a teaching job, though she has an ulterior motive which will be important later.  Happy tries to explain that she's never been to Pakistan, doesn't know anyone named Bilal, and they have clearly kidnapped the wrong woman, but Chang can't believe that there could be two Happy Kaurs from Amritsar, so he has his men kidnap more people from the first movie in order to convince her to cooperate.  Bagga (Jimmy Shergill) and Usman (Piyush Mishra) are delivered just in time to discover that Happy has escaped, and so Chang orders his new prisoners to track down his old prisoner, because Chang really isn't very good at crime.

The escaped Happy wanders the streets of Shanghai in search of someone to help her get to the college, and eventually she meets sad sack Sardar and embassy worker Kushwant Singh Gill (Jassi Gill), who finally agrees to help her by taking her to meet influential Pakistani-Chinese businessman Adnan Chow (Denzil Smith.)  (Chow has a dark secret, and you've probably already figured out what it is.)  Chow agrees to help, but urges Happy and Kushwant to lie low for a while, and especially not to go to the police, since his sources tell him that there's a warrant for Happy's arrest for drug smuggling.

Happy and Kushwant dutifully return to his apartment and  lie low, but somehow Chang manages to find them, with Bagga and Usman in tow.  This is clearly not the Happy that they know, so there's some confusion, leading to a brief scuffle, and Happy, Kushwant, Bagga, and Usman all escape together.

That's when Happy reveals her ulterior motive; she was left at the altar by childhood friend and arranged groom Aman (Aparshakti Khurana), and she's come to China to find him and drag him back to Punjab to apologize to her father.  The others agree to help, which means it's time for a road trip.  Kushwant keeps in touch with Chow, who offers helpful advice, while Chang mysteriously keeps finding them.

Meanwhile, after a very confusing day at the university, the other Happy and Guddu meander through Shanghai, enjoying an unscheduled second honeymoon.  Will the two plots intersect?  Eventually!

Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi is probably funnier than the first movie, but it's missing the little arthouse touches that made the first movie interesting, though to be fair most of those arthouse touches come from having Abhay Deol in the cast.  On the other hand, some things don't change. The original Happy and Guddu are still incredibly static characters who don't really change and don't learn anything.  They're also further in the background this time around; I think Bilal has more of an impact on the plot, and he's not even in the movie.

Setting the movie in Shanghai is a bit of a risk, since Bollywood has a long history of offensive portrayals of Chinese people.  (Looking at you, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani!)  Chang is the most prominent Chinese character here, and he's a violent gangster who is bad at his job, while his subordinates are fools, but their foolishness is not a function of being Chinese, and the various supporting characters are portrayed as people.  There are a few jokes based around "They all look the same to me," but the joke seems to be that Bagga and Usman are a bit prejudiced, and that prejudice comes back to bite them.

This is a sequel with surprisingly tight continuity with the first movie, with characters reflecting on previous events rather than merely recycling jokes.  It's still a sequel, though, recycling many of the plot points from the previous outing on a bigger scale, while omitting the actually interesting characters form the first one.  Fortunately, the new Happy and Kushwant are interesting ion their own right, and do experience plenty of character development.  Somebody has to.

The power of Jugni is a curious thing.

 Jugni is a recurring character and metaphor and theme in Punjabi folk music.  A Jugni songs usually features a wide eyed innocent young woman arriving in a strange place, learning something new and providing illuminating commentary, sometimes humorous and sometimes sad.  Many Indian movies feature Jugni songs, in part because many Indian movies are about young women traveling to new places and having adventures.  The Jugni song in Happy Bhaag Jayegi (2016), for instance, plays while a runaway Indian bride is running through the streets in Pakistan.

The runaway bride in question is Harpreet "Happy" Kaur (Diana Penty).  Her father (Kanwaljit Singh) has arranged her marriage to local politician Baggu (Jimmy Shergill), but she's really in love with penniless struggling musician Guddu (Ali Fazal).  Guddu's friend has arranged for a flower truck to be parked outside the wedding venue, and at the appointed time, Happy sneaks away and jumps into . . . well, she jumps into the wrong truck, and the next morning she emerges from the basket she was hiding in, to find herself in a mansion in Lahore, Pakistan.

Bilal Ahmed (Abhay Deol), son of retired politician Javed Ahmed (Javed Sheikh) is very surprised to find an angry Indian woman in his living room.  Bilal has spent his entire life trying to live up to his father's expectations, including giving up cricket (because who ever heard of a cricketer becoming successful in Pakistani politics) and agreeing to a political betrothal to childhood friend Zoya (Momal Sheikh), and he knows that having an undocumented young Indian woman in a wedding dress in the house is probably a bad look, politically, but before he can really do anything about the situation, Happy runs away.

She is promptly arrested by comic relief policeman ASP Usman Afridi (Piyush Mishra), who has always wanted to arrest an Indian spy.  Happy tries to bluff her way out of the situation by claiming to be a guest of the Ahmed family, and that brings Bilal around to collect her.  He's taking her to be deported when they are stopped by Zoya.  After a very complicated and frantic series of explanations, Zoya points out the obvious: Happy can still cause trouble for the Ahmeds after being returned to India, so the best tactic is to keep her happy.  The best way to do that is to bring Guddu to India, get the young couple married, and then send them both home - once the marriage is finalized, Happy's father will have to accept it, and Baggu can learn to deal with disappointment.

The plan is unnecessarily complicated.  Bilal and Usman travel to India to find Guddu, posing as music producers.  Guddu is being held by Baggu, so Bilal and Usman have to strike a complicated balance in order to convince Guddu that Happy is in Lahore, without letting Baggu know.  They succeed, meaning everything will be fine as long as Baggu doesn't discover the truth.

Baggu discovers the truth, and the plot gets much more complicated, with everybody in Lahore, multiple kidnappings, Bilal reconsidering all of his life choices, and Zoya noticing just how close Bilal and Happy have become.  The only solution to everyone's problems is a mass wedding, I guess.

It sounds like a farce, and there are certainly jokes and moments of humor, but the characters take the situation completely seriously.  Abhay Deol has built his reputation on quirky art films, and even in a  commercial entertainer like this one he brings a quirky art film energy, while Momal Sheikh is a soap opera actress, and she brings that level of intensity to every scene.

In the end, our Jugni doesn't learn much from her journey.  Happy and Guddu are both fairly static characters, and while their situation has changed by the end of the film, their personalities really haven't.  Zoya and Bilal, on the other hand, change a lot; they start the movie as a man who gave up on his dreams and his bossy fiance, and they end with a recontextualized relationship and a new approach to life.  That's the real power of Jugni.

Friendly appearance by Florida Man.

 Bollywood has a knack for sudden genre shifts, but A Gentleman (2017) is the only case I can think of where an action comedy suddenly transforms into a different action comedy.  That twist is the bit I find interesting, so naturally I am going to spoil it.

Gaurav Kapoor (Siddharth Malhotra) is a salesman at a software firm in Miami.  His best friend Dixit (Hussain Dalal) accuses him of living his life in reverse - he's got a good job, a nice house in the  suburbs, and a safe and reliable minivan, but he doesn't have a wife to share it with, let alone the four children he's hoping for.  And fair enough!  Gaurav does have his eye on his beautiful but shallow coworker Kavya (Jacqueline Fernandez), but while she's noticed that he's a good looking guy, she thinks he's a bit too safe.  Still, Gaurav is content - Dixit calls him "the happiest sad person I've ever met."

Gaurav has reluctantly agreed to travel to Mumbai for work.  As Kavya drives him to the airport, he's about to tell her something significant, but instead he promises to tell her when he gets back.

Meanwhile Rishi (also Siddarth Malhotra) is a spy working for Unit X, a clandestine organization headed by Colonel Vijay Saxena (Suniel Shetty).  Rishi is not happy, since the other members of his unit, and especially Yakub (Darshan Kumaar) are a little too comfortable with civilian casualties.  When Yakub shoots a man who caught a glimpse of the group after a disastrous mission in Bangkok, Rishi leaves.

The Colonel makes a half-hearted assassination attempt just to get Rishi's attention, then makes him an offer - one last job, and he's free.  All he has to do is intercept a hard drive being delivered to a government official in Mumbai by a guy named Gaurav Kapoor.

This is a perfect setup for a classic mistaken identity comedy, with the two men switching lives, learning valuable life lessons, successfully wooing each other's love interests, and possibly discovering that they're actually long lost twins who were separated during a childhood visit to the fun fair.  But it's a trick - the two plotlines are actually set five years apart, and the real Gaurav is a) played by Kunal Sharma, and b) dead.  This is really Bollywood Grosse Pointe Blank, with a (sort of) reformed assassin trying to live an ordinary life only to discover that he can't outrun his past and he's going to have to outshoot it.  

I'm not sure that this is a deliberate take on Grosse Pointe Blank, and it's certainly not any sort of officially sanctioned remake, but it does hit a lot of the same beats.  It's a black comedy punctuated with light romance and a number of action scenes set in unlikely environments, in this case including a duct tape battle in Home Depot, a martial arts fight in a laundromat, and a whole lot of gunplay in Gaurav's lovely home.

Sidharth Malhotra is often typecast as the earnest, sensible guy who can be counted on to do the right thing, and that's what really makes A Gentleman work. Rishi isn't pretending to be the cheerful stick in the mud and aspiring family man who carefully drives the speed limit and insists on coasters when his guests have a drink; actual Gaurav isn't like that at all, it's just Rishi living his best life.  Sure, it takes being revealed as a killer on the run to get Kavya to take a second look at him, but it's being a grownup that makes the relationship interesting.

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.

 Shahid Kapoor is a fine actor, and probably my favorite cinematic Hamlet.  He didn't spring into being as a full fledged respected thespian, though - Kapoor's first film appearance was as a background dancer, and he's had a complicated career.  For every Jab We Met there's been a Fool N Final, for every Fida there's been a Dora and Diego's 4-D Adventure Catch That Robot Butterfly (no, I am not kidding) and for every Haider there has been a Phata Poster Nikhla Hero (2013.)

Usually when a movie starts with its aspiring actor hero making a dramatic entrance and beating up a large crowd of violent criminals, it's a dream, and probably a dream about a film shoot.  Vishwas Rao (Shahid Kapoor), on the other hand, actually beats people up.  He's a natural action hero, because his mother Savitri (Padmini Kolhapure) has always dreamed of her son becoming a policeman, and when he was a child she made sure he was trained in martial arts specifically so that he could fight large groups of attackers.  

Savitri is a rickshaw driver who respects the law and has a powerful sense of justice, stemming form her tragic backstory involving Yashwanth (Mukesh Tiwari), who was her husband, Vishwas's father, and a spectacularly corrupt policeman who apparently died while fleeing angry villagers.  This will be important later.

Vishwas adores his mother, but he's an aspiring actor, not an aspiring policeman, and he deliberately blows every interview Savitri arranges.  Finally she pulls some strings and arranges for an interview in Mumbai, and Vishwas agrees to go because it's Mumbai, center of the film industry.

 

Once in town Vishwas meets Guruji (Sanjay Mishra), an unsuccessful writer with connections to the industry.  Guruji sends him to get some proper pictures taken, and a chain of farcical events leads to Vishwas riding home on a borrowed scooter while wearing a borrowed police uniform.  That's when he meets Kajal (Ileana D'Cruz), a social worker known to the police as "Complaint Kajal" for her annoying tendency to notice crimes and ask them to do something about it.  Kajal has spotted a kidnapping, and she spots Vishwas just in time and sends him in hot pursuit.  The crooks are confused because they've paid off Inspector Ghorpande (Zakir Hussein), so the police should be leaving them alone.  Vishwas arrives at the right time, and when the crooks try to drive him off, he beats them all up, saving the kidnapped girl in the process.

Vishwas and Kajal keep meeting by accident, and she keeps dragging him off to stop crimes in progress.  Thanks to his fighting skills and flair for the dramatic, Vishwas becomes a highly successful accidental vigilante, leading crimelord Gundappa (Saurabh Shukla) to demand that Ghorpande find this mysterious and effective new policeman before the enigmatic international criminal mastermind Napoleon (he's the Moriarty of Crime!) arrives to begin Operation White Elephant.

That's not nearly complicated enough, though, so the Joint Commissioner of Police Shivanand Khare (Darshan Jariwala), who is not corrupt, also wants to find the strangely effective newcomer.  And after spotting a picture of Vishwas in uniform in the newspaper, Savitri insists on coming to Mumbai to see him work, so Guruji and a few other friends borrow a scheme from Munnabhai, M.B.B.S. (deliberately - Vishwas specifically mentions the movie) and put up an elaborate front to fool her into thinking that her son really is a police officer.  It only has to last for three days, so what could go wrong?

The charade falls apart almost as completely as Munna's fake hospital did.  When she discovers the truth, Savitri confronts her wayward son and then collapses from Sudden Onset Bollywood Mystery Disease.  The doctor tells Vishwas that she will need an operation, and he'd better be prepared to pay one million rupees, or his mother will die.  And that's when Gundappa appears with a simple offer - he'll pay for the operation if Vishwas will retrieve a CD with a secret message from Napoleon from onstage at a dance festival.  

After the obligatory dance number, Vishwas retrieves the CD, then Khare's honest police appear and try to get their hands on it.  In the ensuing scuffle, two policemen are shot dead, leaving Vishwas a wanted man with no apparent choice but to join Gundappa's gang.  Of course, not everything is as it appears . . .

Phata Poster Nikhla Hero is a spoof of nineties Bollwood action comedies, and it's quite open about it.  Vishwas points out the plotpoints lifted from Munnabhai and Amitabh Bachchan's Don, and at the end of the movie he ticks off all the filmi tropes he's lived through.  However, a good spoof is an example of the thing it's spoofing, and this is a good spoof.  (Also, those movies were pretty silly to begin with.)  The movie follows established tropes, but it commits tot hem, and it executes them well.

The supporting cast is good - Shukla has an air of affable menace, Kolhapure is an excellent filmi mom and adds a hefty dose of melodrama to everything she says, and D'Cruz gives a very Juhi Chawla role her own spin.  But this is absolutely Shahid Kapoor's movie.  He's got all the charm and filial piety you'd expect from the hero of one of these movies, but between the dramatic plot twists and the fact that Vishwas is an actor, Kapoor manages to display a surprising amount of range for such a light and fluffy part.  It's no Hamlet, but it wasn't meant to be.

How to win friends and punch people.

Dishoom (2016) is not a movie with pretensions.  It knows exactly what it wants to be: a bombastic summer action flick with maverick cops, sports, jokes, a pretty girl, and no deeper emotional complexity than the enduring and eternal bond between buddies.  Spoiler: that's exactly what Dishoom is.

During a cricket tournament in Abu Dabi, Indian cricket superstar Viraj Sharma (Saqib Saleem) has gone missing.  Soon after a hostage video surfaces, apparently from a deranged, self proclaimed Pakistan fan (Faisal Rashid) who demands that the tournament be played without Viraj.  The local police keep Viraj's disappearance quiet, and the Indian government insists on sending one of their best, Kabir Shergill (John Abraham), to help with the case.

Kabir is a maverick cop who plays by his own rules, by which I mean that he's an arrogant jerk who is introduced beating up the guy who asked him not to smoke in the elevator.  Almost immediately after landing in Abu Dabi, he pulls a gun on a police officer and demands to be taken to the Indian team's hotel rather than the police station.

Miraculously, Kabir is not thrown in jail, or even taken off the case.  Instead, he is partnered with rookie cop Junaid Ansari (Varun Dhawan).  Junaid's main qualification is that he knows every street in the city, thanks to a year spent fruitlessly searching for a  missing dog.  (The dog turns out to be very important later.)  With the help of sexy pickpocket Ishika (Jacqueline Fernandez) they track down the psychotic superfan only to discover that he's a struggling actor who thought he was auditioning for a role.

Cut to the real villain, sports bookie Wagah (Akshaye Khana), who is tired of Viraj's miraculous last minute cricket wins.  Wagah also would like to make a great deal of money.  He tries bribing Viraj, but the cricket star is a patriot, and he will not betray his country, either for money or to save his own life.  Wagah orders his henchman Altaf (Rahul Dev) to store Viraj in nearby Abbudin.

Meanwhile, Kabir has finally been thrown off the case; he's a loose cannon who plays by his own rules, but so far he has not been getting results.  Junaid hands in his badge, and the pair break Ishika out of jail to help them get into Abbudin, where they an underground arm-wrestling ring which uses captive women as currency.  This leads to a big musical number.

Dishoom is probably most successful when it's a bromantic comedy.  Abraham and Dhawan have an easy chemistry, and the two characters do seem to bring out the best in each other, relatively speaking; Junaid softens some of Kabir's rough edges, while Kabir gives Junaid the respect that he needs.  I don't particularly like either character, but I believe that they like one another.

The romantic tracks are less successful.  Ishika clearly likes Kabir, but the characters barely interact at all, while Junaid keeps receiving unsolicited calls from Qureshi (Satish Kaushik) to tell him that the entire family saw Junaid's matrimonial ad and they didn't like the looks of him.  I will never say no to a Parineeti Chopra cameo, but it takes  along and not very funny brick joke to get her there.

The movie's real hero is Viraj, who suffers his captivity with dignity, holds firm to his ideals, and never points a gun at anyone over a trivial dispute. Unfortunately, he doesn't get a lot of screentime, but most of his screentime is shared with Akshaye Khanna, the cast's real standout.  I still think of Khanna as the gentle Sid from Dil Chahta Hai, but he's clearly having a wonderful time chewing the scenery and carrying out an evil scheme which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  

While Dishoom is mostly successful as a dumb action movie (it's dumb, and there is action) the movie keeps threatening to deal with serious issues, and then not following through.  The arm wrestling sequence and accompanying musical number are probably the worst example.  There's a harrowing moment when Kabir and Junaid catch sight of the captive women who are explicitly being offered as prizes, with one of the women silently begging for help.  They can't help yet (because secret mission) and it's Ishika doing the dancing for reasons that are never explained, and after the dance number and ensuing motorcycle chase the women are never mentioned again; instead we get a long sequence of Junaid repeatedly being hit in the crotch by flags.  It's a sour note in an otherwise silly movie.

The last rose of summer.

The plot of Doob: No Bed of Roses (2017) is remarkably straightforward.  Film director Javed Hasan (Irrfan Khan) is apparently happily married to Maya (Rokeya Prachy).  In a moment of weakness he has a brief affair with a much younger actress named Nitu (Parno Mitra.)  Nitu is not just young enough to be Javed's daughter, she is a childhood friend of his actual daughter Saberi (Tisha.)  And that's it.  That's the plot.  One bad decision causes everybody's lives to unravel.

The film jumps back and forth through time, starting with the events surrounding Javed eloping with Maya (who was also too young for him when the relationship started.)  There are scenes of Nitu and Saberi at school, scenes of Javed's happy life with his family, and scenes of Maya, Saberi and little brother Ahir (Rashad Hossain) trying to put their lives back together, while Javed drifts into an uncomfortable marriage with Nitu.  The film is bookended by scenes of Saberi and Nitu at their unbelievably awkward high school reunion.

This is not a movie in which things happen, in other words.  It's a movie in which one thing happened, and people stand around and talk and talk and talk about the ramifications of that one thing.  It's very much an art film, and it is slow and solemn and moves from feeling a bit like a stage play to feeling exactly like a stage play.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, because this movie stars Irrfan Khan, who can make "slow and solemn and stagey" incredibly compelling, especially when he's supported by a strong cast.  It's the kind of movie that relies on moments, and the moments are very good indeed.  There's an especially haunting and nearly silent scene in which Saberi offers her newly estranged father a glass of water; it should be nothing, but instead it's one last moment of connection before everything collapses, and they both know that.  It takes a lot of confidence to devote that much screentime to drinking a glass of water, but it pays off.