First Take: About getting second chances in life

Whoever said that life is fair has not seen the protagonist Emily Benetto in a film glibly titled Emily The Criminal. It’s almost like The Scarlett Letter. There is no getting away from for Emily from her criminal past. But this is not the story of a sad self-pitying snivelling child of destiny sailing into the stormy seas wherever the winds take her.

What makes Emily so special and remarkable is her riveting resilience. She will fight and she will win…at least she will try until her last breath.

The inbuilt danger in this kind of cinema is that you begin to feel empathy for the criminal. This is not that kind of a film. Audrey Plaza, an exceptional actress whom I didn’t like in her much-talked-about The Black Bear, is given, for the first time, the kind of curvaceous sharp-edged role for which actresses have to wait for all their careers.

Audrey has done quite a lot of work. But this is her actual beginning. As Emily, she is a sullen embittered but strong-willed ball of rage. Luckily for her, the script (written by debutant director John Patton Ford) is on her side. Audrey Plaza’s Emily will hit your hard with her imperturbable insistence on getting justice in her own way. Sure Emily has had a terrible life. But that’s not the way it’s going to be forever. Not even for a day more will she allow her life to be swept in the tidal waves of crappy destiny.

Emily The Criminal is gripping in a way that most crime thrillers are not. Here the felonious protagonist is neither a hero nor a victim. She is someone who made a mistake and is not afraid to own up to it.

I liked the two parallel tracks that the narration constructs for Emily. In one, she tries to go straight with the help of her best friend (Megalyn Echikunwoke, attractive). In the other track, she is repeatedly thrown into a life of crime as a credit card scamster. It is a truly dichotomous life. The writer-director makes no effort to milk Emily’s predicament.

I almost expected the script to pop up the single-mother angle for Emily. But nope. Everything that Emily does, she does it for herself. This film, much more significant than its crime-thriller format suggests, tell us it’s okay to be selfish, to look out for oneself. In a very crucial climactic conflict, Emily has to choose between love and escape. No prizes for guessing what she chooses

In another very powerful sequence when Emily is waylaid in her own apartment by a couple of hustlers she fights back, and how. And watch Emily make her escape with a scammed car from a showroom. It is heart-in-the-mouth.

While the film offers Audrey Plaza the opportunity to go with Emily’s glow,I had problems with her co-star Theo Rossi’s character Youssef, a scamster who gets Emily into the business of phantom shopping. If we are supposed to be impressed by Youcef’s gutter–level energy it doesn’t quite work. There is a difference between a reluctant criminal and a scumbag. And the twain shall never meet.

I must mention a job interview where Emily is told by her prospective boss that she would be taken on only as an intern. Emily hits back. It’s a beautifully crafted sequence bringing to the surface the work ethics and job hierarchy in posh places.

Emily The Criminal is an engrossing film with terrific writing and intense performances that take us from one arresting episode to another in a zigzag that never allows our interest level to sag.

Norwegian director Anna Gutto’s Paradise Highway tells a bleak but hopeful story of a female trucker and a pre-teen girl who are thrown together by fate…If Fate is what you want to call the scumbags and drug dealers who hover at the fringe of this dark but hopeful tale that is powered completely by a sledgehammer performance by that French wonder-woman Juliette Binoche.

I’ve read some very nasty comments on the film and Binoche, that she is completely miscast, blah blah. But miscast, how and why? Because she played brokenhearted women in romantic dramas all her life? Binoche is capable of the earth and the sky. As a trucker, she is as much of a powerhouse as ever. She brings to her character Sally a sense of doom with tragic dignity.

Her chemistry with the little girl Leila (Hala Finley) grows organically out of mutual hostility and a need to find love. The little girl keeps asking people around her, “Have you ever felt lonely?”

She asks this of a little Black boy, far happier and more well-adjusted than she, with another trucker-mother at a truckers’ parking lot. The boy seems very well-settled and seems confused by her question. Leila has seen a hard life. Her face reflects an unspoken pain and an ensuing maturity far beyond her years. The film shows how the bonding based on suffering can cross generations to bring two very disparate human beings together in an embrace of empathy.

There is no ‘embrace’ though. Both 50-something Sally and 9-nothing Leila are afraid of physical demonstration of love. They are victims of emotional and physical abuse. They are two islands. Paradise Highway ultimately becomes a parable of two drifters coming together.

Repression is a running theme here. This is Little Miss Sunshine without the sunshine. Or maybe, there is just a spot of sunshine. Every time the lady truckers connect across America’s highways the screen lights up with a fleeting joy. But those moments of shared joy are few and far in-between in this grim glum story of homelessness and longing.

The big blotch in the plot is once-brilliant now-wasted Morgan Freeman as a cop looking for the trucker and her unlikely co-passenger. Rather than a retired cop that Freeman is supposed to be playing, the actor looks like a washed-out alcoholic trying to find his way back into the mainstream. What has happened to this once-wonderful actor from Driving Miss Daisy?

Paradise Highway is a beautifully shot film with images of the truck driving through vast stretches reminding us of the sheer desolation of life amplified by the protagonist’s nomadic existence. At times Juliette Binoche reminded me of Frances McDormand in Nomadland. But that is a far better film.

Speaking of second chances reminds me of Suriya ’s 2016 Tamil time-travel film 24. It sets out to change the way Indian cinema looks at the sci-fi genre. Somewhere along the way it loses direction and becomes a sorry spoof of all the popular films on time-travel from Escape To The Future to Looper. The narrative heft is reliant entirely on the post-interval confrontations between the evil (and now wheelchair-bound) Athreya and his nephew Mani. By this point in time, the plot is looking straight into eyes of a mid-life crisis. Writer-director Vikram Kumar’s ambitious canvas is unmatched by a strong spine in the storytelling. The tension in the plot is substantially diminished by the writing’s zeal to be cleverer than the audience. Time games are played between the characters with some catastrophic consequences to the narrative’s equilibrium.

The special effects and the visual dazzle are largely mediocre. Tirru’s cinematography seems awed by its own wizardry. Self-control is seriously absent.The action sequences are rugged but inconsistent. What holds this unwieldy saga together to some extent, is Suriya’s ebullient efforts to play the three characters at different scales.Finally, though Suriya and the film’s ambitions are defeated by the quality of the writing which at best is mediocre. Suriya deserves better.

Like Kamal Haasan, Suriya now threatens to become many sizes larger than his films. His recent films have either featured him in more than one role (Anjaan, 24) or as bombastic rhetoric-spewing unzippered heroes with motor-mouthed dialogues that looked designed for Rajnikanth.

In 24 (no relation to the Anil Kapoor series of that title) Suriya plays three roles. He is Sethuraman an amiable scientist and his ‘watch mechanic’ (the term is used at least 34 times) son, and his evil twin brother Athreya who slays the scientist and his wife (Nithya Menen) in what could easily be forsaken footage from a Tarantino film.

The sheer gruesomeness of Menen’s murder (is this a cursed appearance?) should have served as a chilling precursor to Athreya’s ruthlessly evil designs. However, his ensuing actions make him look more like a spoilt silly sibling than a supervillain who hankers to get his scientist brother’s time-travel watch.

Ah, the watch! How time flies! In a quickly wrapped-up transition (belying the prolonged and protracted plot build-ups that follow) Sethuraman’s son Mani grows up to be…well a citified version of Shiva (Prabhas) in Baahubali. The tiresome and over-cute relationship between Mani and his foster-mother (Saranya Ponvanan) seems to have been ripped off from Baahubali.

Before audiences drown in the milk of maternal kindness the narrative introduces Mani’s love interest Sathya (Samantha Ruth Prabhu). For the next half an hour and more of this extended ode to time travel, time is wasted in flirtatious songs (Rahman’s tired genius reloaded) and coy exchanges are done in that breathless tone that over-grown heroes in Indian cinema adapt when they play Mama’s boys in love for the first time.

The film criminally squanders away precious time in corny courtship and tomfoolery. Worst still the magical time-defying wrist-watch that is the key to the film’s scientific-magic Mr India-Meets-Ironman aspirations is reduced to a tacky gimmick for Mani to win over the girl.

Think of the irony of using H G Wells’ theory of time travel to score dating points. It is as absurd as using a nuclear bomb to scare off your neighbour’s dog.

What if we get the chance to rectify all the big mistakes of our life? And what if a magical wand takes us into the future to personally witness all those critical twists and turns on the road journey of life where we may swerve into the wrong lane? And then, what if we get a chance to revise our actions and deeds accordingly?

Debutant director Nitya Mehra’s Baar Baar Dekho is unlike any romantic yarn — I hesitate from giving it that loosely-used term the ‘rom-com’. It is the ultimate what-if saga, narrated with a tender care and subdued splendour that makes every moment between the lead pair precious and gladdening. Watching the film, we are just happy to see Jai and Diya together. It could be because they are played by two good looking stars of our cinema. Sidharth Malhotra and Katrina Kaif look so made for each other that it seems absurd to even suggest that they can be separated by destiny or design — or in this case by designed destiny.

But human nature is such — and this is the ‘sach’ (truth) that this unusually conceptualized film dwells on with mollifying magnificence — that it sinks the very ship that keeps hope afloat. With believable nearsightedness — don’t we all mess up in life? — Jai tells Diya on the day of their wedding that he would rather not marry her and instead pursue his dreams of going to Cambridge.

The hurt, humiliation, bewilderment and disappointment that Katrina shows on screen in her sequence of painful rejection dashing hopes of shared lifetime, is a joy to behold. This is the first occasion in her career when Katrina has actually sunk her ego into her character. You can see her feeling the hurt and the happiness with equal sincerity. Bravo!

Sidharth Malhotra, so far seen giving performances where his matinee-idol looks obfuscate his other purported virtues, comes into his own with a character who is clueless about the stunning time travel that fate/destiny/karma/kundli puts him through. It’s a morality fable bolstered by bouts of effervescence, nostalgia regret and pain. It takes us a while to fall into a rhythm and pattern, as Sidharth Malhotra’s character of the Maths teachers hurls from one age span into another in pursuit of the unforgivable lapses that could ruin anyone’s life.

Just imagine: you fail to show up for your wife’s painting exhibition and she falls in love with her arts dealer. Or you may not cuddle your little daughter when she asks you to do so, and this may cause indelible damage to your domesticity.

Exceptionally, Baar Baar Dekho trusts silences rather than the talking. There are long passages without background music to over-punctuate the drama of disintegration that the couple plays out. The emotions the couple exchange seem relevant and real, as the dialogues (by Anvita Dutt) rip off pages from contemporary marriages all over the world without creating cut-and-paste haste in the conversations. There is plenty of the rare quality of gravitas tucked away in the mischievous love tale, none more mischievous than the pundit (played with able astuteness by Rajit Kapur) who is supposed to solemnise Jai and Diya’s wedding. Jai thinks the pundit is responsible for his rushed futuristic time travel. But is he? Is this ability to stare your mistakes in their eyes a quirk of fate? Or is it something else?

Baar Baar Dekho doesn’t seek or give us substantiated answers on cosmic mysteries. Why Man does what he does, who is responsible for our actions — sometimes horribly wrong — we don’t know. Neither does the film. Director Nitya Mehra glides with a silent giggle and a sigh across a beautifully painted skyline of wistful thinking.

There is plenty to celebrate in Baar Baar Dekho, not the least of its virtues being the ability to deliver marital home truths without sermons or soliloquies. As the film’s main premise suggests, the success of a relationship is in the smaller details. Likewise, this film. It strings together scenes from a situation of marital calamity with an easygoing swagger that Ingmar Bergman would have found distracting.

The actors have given their heart and soul to the main parts. And some of the supporting cast — not all, I am afraid — is also exceptional. But the real hero of the film is Ravi K Chandran’s camerawork. The magician that he is, Chandran imbues every frame with warmth charm and beauty. Sequences recreating Cambridge University (where a Ramanujan-like professor mentors Jai) reminded me of that very fine Ramanujan biopic The Man Who Knew Infinity.

The futuristic styling is apt without getting outlandish. Come to think of it — there is nothing over-the-top in this quietly accomplished film except the “Kala chashma” song and dance. Why on earth was it used to promote the film? That zingy cheesy aura of that song is so not the film.

Baar Baar Dekho is about getting a second chance of changing the mistakes in life without making them. But really, I can’t think of one thing I’d like to see changed in this film. Except maybe Sarika’s prosthetics when she plays dead. Someone overdid the mother’s wrinkles.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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