Dum Maaro Dum Review

Dolce: You know after seeing Paa when we begged the Gods of Bollywood to cast Abhishek and Vidya again in a movie as a couple? Surely this is not their idea of delivering, is it?

Namak: You mean the split seconds of Vidya that add up from all parts of the film to give us a full minute by the end of it? I sure hope that's not the last we see of them! If it weren't for SRK and Tabu's useless guest appearance in Saathya, then Vidya would take away the Most Useless Guest Appearance by a Big Star award.

Dolce: I still enjoyed it though. It was such a pleasant surprise.

Namak: I felt it was a waste of her time and pretty face. And her status as a class A actress. Not to mention a waste of her acting skills... of which there were none here. Strange casting decision...

Unfortunately the odd casting decisions don't stop here... Mit Jaaye Gham also turned out to be terribly cast, on top of being a really bad song: you take a decent dancer and give her no choreography? If they wanted a photo shoot, why bother to pay Bosco Caesar? Surely plenty of amateur photographers from Bombay would have lined up to do this. For free!!

Namak: And why would they go through all that trouble to make Deepika Padukone look like Priyanka Chopra with the make-up and the clothes? Was Piggy Chops unavailable for this item?

Dolce: Maybe she turned it down. After all, how many more photoshoots of your midriff can you do before it gets old. Priyanka has paid her dues with Fashion and Anjaana Anjaani, no?

Namak: Oh, you give her too much credit. I'm sure we're not done seeing skin from Priyanka, but I do still find it very odd what they did with Deepika's make-up.

While on the topic of the item number and the scenes depicting the rave scene in Goa / Karnataka, I must say it sure seemed like a cool place to be in. Made me think of Miami during the Winter Music Conference, except the blondes are hotter and even less dressed in South Beach. Still, quite a treat to see an alternative to the obligatory club scene. I'm always happy to see sand and trees in a "club" number. Perhaps why I cherish the title song from I Hate Luv Storys as well, despite the terrible dancing. Ah.. to dance on the beach... nothing quite like it!
Of course the coolness factor is reduced to zero when a gunshot paralyses everything and everyone. Last time I was at such a party, I am sure a person could have been shot right next to me and no one would have heard it. Oh well... such poetic licences are to be glossed over else I'd never enjoy another action movie again.

But now back to what was great about Dum Maaro Dum, a thriller about the drug mafia in Goa, the South Beach of India.

Dolce: By the way I always appreciate movies that give other nationalities some space, even if they're all druglords, rowdies and villains. I liked it in Kaminey and I liked it in Dum Maaro Dum. 

Namak: You don't mind the fact that it gives the impression that virtue is all Indian while sin is international?

Dolce: Sure I do, but it also takes India out of its bubble and gives film makers a chance to experiment with accents, non-Indian actors and writing for other cultures. If they keep practicing, eventually they'll even get it right!

The best thing about Dum Maaro Dum is that it works as a thriller. I can count on one hand the Bollywood thrillers that kept me on the edge of my seat until the end, whether they were good movies or not: Kaminey, Ghajini and Dhoom2. All the other ones either lose steam, or they give away too much thus making the "twist" predictable, or they're just boring. So adding DMD to this short list is a great compliment to Rohan Sippy and the gang.

Add to that some great one-liners, usually from badass ACP Kamath (Abhishek Bachchan in my favourite avatar: the too-cool-for-school cop), and you've got yourself a pretty good movie for any audience.

Sure you may have to subtract points for a couple of angelic interventions: one from a dead person and one from St Anthony himself, but hey, it is Bollywood after all!

As much as I enjoyed the other characters, played by Bipasha Basu, Prateik Babbar and Rana Daggubati, for me this movie was all about Abhishek Bachchan and his skinny Southie stache!

No one does this kind of cool as well as Abhishek, except maybe Lorenzo Lamas in the Renegade series. The only two heroes that can sell me the riding off into the sunset scenario while keeping me completely unaware of plot holes, male chauvinism, and other such issues that would bother me in, say, a love story.

But that doesn't go to say the film is not also worth watching for the side stories. I could never understand Joki's involvement right in the thick of things (Rana Daggubati) and why he would put his own life at risk to clear someone's name, but I went with it, and apart from his half baked motivations, I found him to be a charming character. The weakest of them all in terms of writing, as he is not given too much depth, but hey, it's all about Abhishek, remember?

I can't fault the writers too much for the lack of character development in the movie overall because I never expect much of it in an action thriller. So whatever little we are given to work with is all right by me. That goes for Bipasha's fallen angel character, and also for Prateik's squealing teenager who strays from the right path. To be fair, we are given some flashbacks to establish everyone's motivations, so whether these are enough or not is everyone's personal choice. They were not enough for me, but I didn't care.

The other great thing about Dum Maaro Dum is the resolution. They play a little bit with old cliches, but they manage to keep it fresh enough and not wander into "same old" territory. In addition, the fact that there is plenty of irony used in the last half hour of the film, starting with a certain death and ending with a certain burial, wins the film a ton of points from me. I love me some good "Hah!" moments!

As a side note the meandering timeline was exquisitely handled by the editors and there is never a moment when you feel lost or confused.Though you may feel sick to your stomach during some of the prison scenes, or watching some of Kamath's unorthodox interrogation methods. Honestly I looked away during those and chose to erase them from my memory for ever, which is why I will not linger on the topic.

Now would be a good time to talk about the political message of the movie, about the social aspects that it delves into and to start a realism vs filmi discussion, but Dum Maaro Dum is just not that type of film for me: I'd be lying if I said any of these points crossed my mind while I was watching. Call me shallow if you will, but I rather think *not* worrying about such things is the way to go to fully enjoy the film. I'd rather dwell in the meta layer of dialogues and songs borrowed from old Amitabh films and how they come into play brilliantly at different key moments. That's more my kind of kick for this type of film.

Dum Maaro Dum is like Emmenthal cheese: the holes are there but the chewy texture and the slightly bitter taste make you feel almost grateful for them, otherwise it would be too intense. It may not be the best cheese for a Sunday night fancy dinner party, but it will do great in a sandwich at the end of a long day at work. It's complex enough to satisfy and yet thin enough to not weigh you down.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera and Hindi movie Pankh

I must confess, I love it when Bollywood goes artsy, despite my love for colour, masala and song and dance routines. I am proud to be one of the 39 people on the planet who love Meenaxi, and movies like Chameli and Raincoat just make my day.

So of course I was willing to forgive a lot of "Pankh", despite the fact that this was the only good review I read about it, just because it dared to bring surrealism into Bollywood just like Meenaxi brought post-modernism. But this post is not about the virtues of the movie, nor is it a review. This post is about its tagline: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being".

Borrowed from Milan Kundera's best-known novel, Pankh's tagline must be trying to tell us something, so I set out to find what connects the two pieces of art that couldn't be any more different. And I will make this analysis a little anti-climactic by warning you from the get-go that I don't really see what the connection is, if it even existed. But as I was digging deeper and deeper for meaning, I was surprised to find many shared themes, though the approach is miles apart.

SURREALISM

Like many other movies that deal with projections and imagination, Pankh has the difficult task of transitioning between reality and fantasy, while still keeping the visuals flowing logically. And it manages beautifully through various devices like doors opening up into enchanted worlds of dream-like creatures, or circular trolley shots where what was hidden before can always make an appearance on the next turn. There are no dreams, but much like Tereza's dreams in Kundera's novel, these projections are symbolic bearers of the character's fears and doubts.

OEDIPUS

This was one of the themes that surprised me by appearing in both the movie and the novel in completely different get-ups. In Kundera's novel it plays a central part in the doctor's life because of a misinterpreted essay that he writes "comparing" communists with Oedipus. Without going into details, the most important point that the book makes is that Oedipus may not have been guilty of the sins he commits, but he still owns up to his actions and punishes himself as if he had been aware of what was happening all along. Who, if not ourselves, is really responsible for our destiny, Kundera makes us wonder.

In Pankh, the theme comes about in a more clinical way, in the form of a dominating, alcoholic mother that Jerry has a love-hate relationship with. She has shaped his destiny from early childhood, and continues to do so, even when Jerry rebels. And just like Kundera we wonder again: who is in control of Jerry's destiny? Is it his mother? Is it his muse? Is it himself? Or is it some higher power? And when the movie ends, can we say that he also, like Oedipus, took his destiny into his own hands? Or did he shift the blame back on his mother?

CONFUSED GENDERS

Funnily enough, the most blatant similarity between the book and the movie comes from the two gender-confused characters: Jerry, a boy forced to play a girl's roles in Bollywood movies during his entire childhood, and Karenin, the dog. Both are forced to exist as the opposite sex for reasons that in the long run turn out to have no weight or reasonable justification. But while the dog Karenin assumes his/her new identity with no repercussions, Jerry's life is forever scarred by this.

WEIGHT AND LIGHTNESS

We come now to the very essence of the title of the book. Without going over the philosophical concepts of what gives weight and what gives lightness to life according to Kundera, I want to focus more on his characters' idea of what gives weight to their own lives. And in this respect, Sabina, the painter, stands out as the one character who cannot bear any strings and who repeatedly abandons everything that could weigh her down. Ironically enough, she is also the one character in the book whose life will continue to mean something to the world after her death, through her art. So her existence is at the same time the most weightless and the heaviest.

Similarly Jerry wills himself weightless, wishes for wings to fly out of his own life, and refuses to acknowledge any mark he may make or may have made on the world. Fame and talent, he thinks, are not important, and his acting is irrelevant. Do his actions in the end give his life any weight? Probably not, and again, ironically, the only thing that will be left of him after his death will be the films he had made as young baby Kusum, a legacy he spends his entire adolescence trying to refuse.

EINMAL IST KEINMAL

The one quote that will likely stay with me whenever I think about "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is "Einmal ist Keinmal" (which roughly translates from German as "what happens once may as well have not happened at all"). Going back to the more philosophical part of the book, Kundera does a brief analysis of Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence, but unlike Nietzsche he focuses on its negative effects. He concludes that the world could not bear the weight of a history altering event, like the French Revolution, happening over and over again because time is the only reason why we are able to see the benefits of such a blood-thirsty affair. On the other hand, having occurred only once, parts of it (namely the bloodshed) have been forgotten as if they had never happened. Thus the conclusion that what happens only once may as well have not happened at all.

This is another point where the movie differs from the book, at first sight, because we know that the abuse that Jerry goes through in his childhood is not an einmal type of situation. In fact, the movie being inspired by real life, we know it has happened to other children as well. Could it then be the type of event that Kundera would deem too heavy a burden for the world if it were to reoccur eternally? Or, since it is a truth so obscure, so little known, and so meaningless to the history of the world, isn't it safer to assume that no, it carries no weight after all, even if it were to happen again and again and again?


THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING?
Other parallels can be drawn between the characters of the book and those of the movie, the philosophy of the book and the events in the movie, but everything that brings the two together, also seems to set them far apart. As I stumble in the dark still looking for that one convincing argument, I have to wonder: did I miss something?