First Take | Redundant remakes & other selfimportant nuisance

The first rule about classics of cinema: do not finger them; they are inviolable. I am not surprised to know Boney Kapoor facilitated Arunraja Kamaraj ’s Nenjuku Needhia , a horrendous over-the-top Tamil remake of Anubhav Sinha’s near-classic Article 15 about caste discrimination. Boney Kapoor has made a career out of producing remakes, from his first production Hum Paanch to all the others that have followed, most of them bad remakes of bad originals.

I recently saw Boney’s Telugu remake of Pink titled Vakeel Saab where the lawyer’s character played in the original by Amitabh Bachchan was here converted into a larger-than-life figure with messianic ambitions with arguments in the courtroom that made him look like an all-knowing seer. In this case, know definitely meant know.

With Pawan Kalyan on board as a lawyer fighting to get justice for the trio of damnified girls, the washed-out bipolar lawyer with a paralyzed bedridden wife from the original transforms into a students leader and a champion of the downtrodden with Shruti Haasan literally stalking him until he relents. Vakeel Babu takes huge uncalled-for liberties with the original script, liberties that add nothing to to the story of three city-girls and their fight for justice after being attacked one night by a privileged spoilt brat (Vamsi Krishna, well played) and his parasitical friends and protected by the perverse politics of patriarchy

As for Pawan Kalyan’s legal eagle act, I have to confess I like the way he argues in court, not through an exaggerated show of anguish and concern, but in a tone that is remarkably cynical of the legal procedure. And after every argument questioning patriarchal rules of feminine behaviour, Pawan’s hands are stretched out quizzically in front of the judge in a grandiloquent WTF gesture. I loved that gesture.

Pawan Kalyan knows he has a formidable adversary in the courtroom in Prakash Raj . They work well together, far more so than Mr Bachchan and Mr Piyush Mishra in the original. This is not to say that this Telugu version of Pink is a better film than the original. It is not. Vakeel Saab doesn’t aspire to be better, just good enough. It wants to put forward the No-means-No argument in a more commercial language. In that endeavour, it succeeds swimmingly sliding in and out of chauvinistic arguments will well-oiled drama that never goes overboard.

Also, I’d like to point out that the moral bandwidth for the three girl’s moral evaluation has been considerably changed. Here their supposed transgressions as seen through the unforgiving male gaze looks far less glaring. These are girls who just want to stay on the right side of the moral boundaries because one has a family to support, another has loans to pay, etc etc.

I came away from the Telugu Vakeel Saab unoffended. I can’t the same about Nenjuku Needhi. The Tamil version of Article 15 is harmful to the human constitution. As for the one that the great Dr Ambedkar wrote, Nenjuku Needhi refers to it repeatedly and with the tedious monotony of space-filling music in an orchestra that suffers from a tendency to run out of steam.

Casteism we know is rampant in our society. In Nenjuku Needhi the characters keep dropping the ‘c’ words with zero tact and meagre passion. The actors including the lead, possess negligible charm. Udhayanidhi Stalin as Vijayraghavan the cop who wants to bring about a change in the way women and men from the socio-economically backward sections are treated. Has privileges that even Marvel superheroes are denied: he is allowed to use the ‘F’ word whenever he is angry or annoyed which is quite often.

Udhayanidhi is a very angry cop. His colleagues at the police station are corrupted and psychologically backward, which is to suggest that backwardness doesn’t necessarily have to do with money and other privileges. It is not a state of the mind. It is the mind of the State, be it Uttar Pradesh in the original, or Tamil Nadu in this remake.

If you’ve seen the original film, and who hasn’t, you would know that the drama’s tension is triggered off when two girls are found hanging from a tree. A third girl is on the run as cops literally wade through slush to find her. The upper class brutes the Brahmanical killjoys did it because the girls asked for 30 rupees extra in wages.

“Do you know what thirty rupees means?” Vijayraghavan who resembles Nikhil Dwivedi, asks his girlfriend who is constantly on the laptop chatting with her boyfriend pretending she is a reformist when all she seems to care about is keeping tabs on her boyfriend. There is the character of a rebel leader who wants to lead a revolt among the Dalits, played with power-fuelled energy in the original by Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub , here reduced to sketchy hazy figure strutting around self-importantly.

There is no room for subtlety in this loud and aggressive remake, impatient to make a statement on social equality, unable to understand that revolutions cannot be achieved at the snap of a finger.

As I sat watching Veetla Vishesham a raucous tone-deaf fatuously faithful remake of one of the most engaging Hindi films in recent times, I wondered why? Why do we need to remake a film that’s already been seen by the whole world and maybe in other galaxies too? One never knows about the reach of the OTT these days. Veetla Vishesham the Tamil remake of Amit Sharma’s outstanding womb-com Badhaai Ho , directed by RJ Balaji who also plays Ayushmann Khurrana’s role from the original, is as welcome as slushponds in the monsoon. It is a ponderously faithful remake with flimsy flourishes of originality that arrive like raisins in a badly-cooked kheer dish.

The film is as concocted and self-aware as the recent Malayalam remake of Anubhav Sinha’s Article 15. And maybe a little more annoying, as every character seems to be mimicking every situation in the original. There was this brilliant sequence in Badhaai Ho where Ayushmann Khurrana’s girlfriend drops in to visit his parents and his father insists on speaking to her in English.

Gajraj Rao’s eager overtures to impress his future daughter-in-law just cannot be matched by Sathyaraj’s laboured gawky delivery. It’s like Kattappa acting cute on us. Everyone including K.P.A.C Lalitha as the grandmother seems to suffer from performance anxiety which they try to conceal by acting over-cute in every key sequence.

Urvashi as the impregnated matriarch Krishnaveni hides whatever genuine empathy she may have for her character in layers of makeup. She and her makeup are no patch on Neena Gupta who simply nailed the conundrum of late pregnancy with a blend of despair and dignity.

Sathyaraj and Urvashi don’t like a couple in love after decades of marriage. They appear to be in love with the characters they play but are unable to connect to one another as kindered spirits.

The dialogues are all done in a tone-deaf replication of the original. One of the highlights of the original was when grandma Surekha Sikri ticks off two nosy relatives in defence of her pregnant daughter-in-law. Lalitha screams and rants in the rinsed-out making the character look inconsistent rather than reformed.

The original statement on parenthood—that it’s never too late as long as the body mind and bank balance allow—is drowned in oodles of homilies layered with the loudest possible snapchat kind of bantering between characters. The family doctor and his wife who inform Unni and Krishnaveni of her pregnancy are supposed to provide the comic break. They are as grating to the nerves as the nosy relatives who have an opinion on women beyond a certain age who are sexually active.

The message is muscled out by a melee of blindly written scenes and oafish dialogues which seem to hero-worship the original material. Nenjuku Needhi is a remake constructed out of awe for the original. Sorry, that’s not how it works.

I am not surprised to know Anurag Kashyap is a producer on Paka , a recent Malayalam film. Internecine wars have always fascinated him and fastened his cinema to a kind of brute force that is the opposite of compassion. Kashyap’s only exception to the ‘ghoul’ is Manmarziyaan , a surprisingly gentle love triangle with three peachy performances by Abhishek Bachchan, Taapsee Pannu and Vicky Kaushal.

Paka is directed by a Kashyap protégé Nithin Lucose who uses the luminous landscape of his hometown Wayanad in Kerala to create a creepy lyricism, a poem destruction. While the rivers and forests look tranquil, buried in their underbelly are the legacy of decades of family feud.

While on paper this sounds snakily sinister, on screen it comes across as sterile and listless, all the savage passion of mutual destruction lost in translation. Paka(which means river of blood) is a strangely emptied-out work of poise-challenged art. The minimalist approach so appropriate in such feudal dramas, here renders the blood-symphony into waves of a watery mess.

The proceedings are nether here nor ‘dare’.Both the sense of immediacy and a feeling of unstoppable rage are smothered in heaps of atmospheric shout-outs. The background music (by Faizal Ahamed) is reverentially subdued . The camerawork (Srikanth Kobithu) trails the characters cautiously in their mutual war of ruination as if the seatbelt sign in a turbulent flight never goes off.

So much bloodshed and the film still appears anaemic, as though afraid to unleash any violence that would offend the squeamish. Paka is like a river of flood, frozen in fear and uncertainty. The attempts to put the spark of passion into the film seem futile.

The main antagonists in this mutual war to the bloodied end are Johnny (Basil Paulose) and Joey (Nithin George). Both effectively played but eventually inconclusive in their respective ideologies. While Johnny wants peace Joey wants the vendetta spree to continue.The hard-earned truce between the two families is shattered when Johnny’s naïve and reformed uncle Kocheppu(Jose Kizhakkkan) returns from jail.

Kocheppu’s attempts to preserve the uneasy peace comes to nought. What follows is the one-of-mine-one-of-yours kind of stepped-up ceaseless slayings that tends to get tedious after a point. Writer-director Nithin Lucose wants us to see the never-ending cycle of blood and fears as a manifestation of masculine arrogance. He leapfrogs from one suppressed homicidal incident after another with the warning that God is watching.We don’t get much evidence of God anywhere on the godforsaken wilderness. Maybe He is offduty.

The performances range from the credible to the dramatic, every character moving from one scene to the next hoping that the script doesn’t wipe them out in the next violent outing. Strangely Johnny’s bellicose grandmother remains completely out of camera range. Whether her invisibility is a metaphor on how women are normally kept out of feudal tensions or whether the lady was camera-shy, we would never know. Paka is film filled with unexplained pauses and silences. All we know for sure at the end is that the rites of wrongful vendetta never end.

Venu Udugula’s Telugu film Virata Parvam is very tough to dismiss as propaganda for Naxalism. It seems so much more, thanks to Sai Pallavi’ s incandescent presence. Set in the 1990s it blatantly romanticizes the Naxal movement, making the participants in the cut-throat movement look like champions of the downtrodden, which they probably were to begin with. And making the police force seem like the hub of brutality and injustice. Which probably was the case in the initial stages of the Naxal movement.

But then the movements lost focus. Not this giddyheaded film, though. It spins an incredibly unlikely story of a girl from a village of Andhra Vennella(Sai Pallavi)who follows her Naxalite hero Ravi Shankar ( Rana Daggubati ) into her ruination. To the lovelorn Vennella she is Ravi Shankar’s Radha and he is her radicalized Krishna.

This state of oblivious virtual blind-dating eventuates in some unintended hilarity.When Vennella meets Ravi Shankar’s mother (Zarina Wahab) the older woman understandably wants to know who this bright-eyed girl is.

“I am your son’s wife. But he doesn’t know it as yet,” Vennella swoons.I am sure there was laughter in the theatre at this giddy headed utterance.

Virata Parvam is not a bad film at all. It is beautifully shot by cinematographers Dani Sanchez-Lopez and Divakar Mani who make the unspoilt forests look relatively comfortable and safe as compared with the serpents and other venomous creatures who stalk the concrete jungle. The cops are shown as scheming predators, stooges to the powers-that-be which again they might have been. But they also died savage deaths in the hands of the Naxals, still do.

Virata Parvam romanticizes the Naxal movement to the point of complete one-sidedness. The view is embarrassing in its unreasonable indulgence of what many sociologists perceive as terror activities. Significantly, Rana Daggubati who is a producer on this misbegotten but not worthless project , casts himself in a far less significant role than his co-star. This film is owned by Sai Pallavi, though I am not sure it’s a proud ownership.

Nandita Das shows up in the latter -half as a pro-Naxal activist. She has played similar roles of a rebel sympathizer in Mani Ratnam’s Kannathil Muthamittal and Gagan Borate’s Lal Salaam and has nothing here to offer that could uplift the banal premise into the stratosphere of sublimity that it strives to achieve.

Sai Pallavi, the most natural-born actress I have seen since Jaya Bhaduri, is capable of elevating the most obnoxious script . In Virata Parvam she is delightfully naïve and infuriatingly stubborn, determined to follow her man’s ideology to her doom. Sai’s journey from her father’s beloved daughter to her beloved’s blindfaithed follower is so kosher, it sort of makes you want to forgive the narrative’s excessive zeal to humanize acts of violence just because …well… it was fashionable at one time to favour fascism.

No, Virata Parvam is not a bad film. It is much worse than that. It is a dangerous film.

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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