Tag: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra

‘Toofan’ is a Mediocre Rehash of Tired, Old Bollywood Cliches and Tropes

Only once does Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra surprise the audience with an element of subversion that comes as a pleasant surprise.

A certain kind of popular Hindi cinema relished staple tropes: hardy hero, servile sidekick, convenient coincidences, contrasting characters, parental opposition, perilous romance — and of course, template songs. Pleasant escapism became a formula; a formula became a depressing time machine. Bollywood has done some heartening course correction over the last several years; now most shoddy films find newer ways to fumble. But Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Toofan, premiering on Amazon Prime Video, insists on using a dial-up connection in the age of streaming platforms.

It’s all in there: a violent extortionist, Aziz (Farhan Akhtar); a respectable doctor, Ananya (Mrunal Thakur); a funny sidekick, Munna (Hussain Dalal); a fastidious coach, Nana Prabhu (Paresh Rawal); debilitating odds; fighting underdog; and an impossible dream, a national boxing championship. And so it begins, a step-by-step reconstruction of an old formula. Aziz gets injured in a fight, goes to a local hospital, sees a doctor, who turns out to be Ananya (of course). They start on a rough note, keep bumping into each other, and – you know how it ends, don’t you? There are enough contrasts. Aziz and Ananya: feared and loved, Dongri and Dadar. Aziz and Aziz: a ruffian and a softie (who spends his free time with the kids at an orphanage; those scenes are filmed with as much finesse as some foreign correspondents describing ‘poor’ Indians).

Ananya sees the compassionate side of Aziz through – what else but – a coincidence. Aziz watches a three-minute YouTube video of a Mohammed Ali match and wants to become a boxer. Nana, a renowned coach, finally decides to train Aziz, but he turns out to be – what are the odds! – Ananya’s father. Sometimes you think the film is operating in some sly meta mode. In an early scene, for instance, Ananya mocks a nurse (Supriya Pathak) defending Aziz, saying, “Uske haalaat bure hain [oh, his circumstances are bad]” – borrowing a line from Hindi potboilers verbatim.

Toofan also stays loyal to the Bollywood playbook (“if a recent approach has been successful, borrow its crucial elements”). So, we’ve some Gully Boy vibes: a poor Mumbai underdog as neglected as his locality — rough around the edges, an evident victim of class divide – training to win a prestigious championship. There’s even a rap song here (besides other similarities: same production house and a co-writer, Vijay Maurya). And if such derivations aren’t enough, the central conceit itself, a boxing drama, is stale, an overfed sub-genre that burps in clichés.

Rehashing popular ideas to make a crowd-pleasing entertainer isn’t a dealbreaker. But unlike any creative adaptation, Toofan is mindless adoption. Mehra, whose films have become progressively worse since Delhi 6 (2009), seems way too complacent, isolating his drama from the possibilities of discovery. Yet a small subplot – politically relevant, subverting genre expectations – stands out: Nana being a bigot. Moreover, giving that role to Rawal, who is right-wing and a vocal champion of the current dispensation, is a casting coup. The writing becomes sharp whose candour takes you by disconcerting surprise. “We should keep Muslims at an arm’s length,” says Nana early in the movie. The film continues to explore his mindset, interrogating and busting his vicious bubble. Later, Nana refuses to order food from a Muslim restaurant, even telling his liberal friend (Mohan Agashe), “Hinduism is in danger because of people like you”, and objects to his daughter’s marriage citing “love jihad”.

Bollywood films hardly depict Hindu fundamentalism, and they definitely don’t do it via an otherwise positive character (Nana is a loving father, an honest friend, a sharp coach). There’s an excellent scene where his friend tells Nana, in reference to him coaching Aziz, that his real religion is boxing. But this is still a Mehra directorial [who last made Mere Pyare Prime Minister (2019)], so this subplot is only effective till a point: Ananya hardly questions her father’s bigotry (her defiance only goes as much to say, “Aziz isn’t like this”) followed by some ‘balancing’ act where Aziz’s landlady tells Ananya to change her name to “Amina” and, when the couple disagrees, orders them to find a new house.

Illogical twists

The rest of the film continues being thoroughly mediocre, popping illogical twists. One of them, transforming the second half, makes no sense at all. Centered on Aziz’s moral conundrum, it contradicts his views in a short span. (People can be contradictory, but the theatrical plot turn doesn’t give you the sense that the makers are self-aware.) Even that twist’s revelation, through CCTV footage in a sports complex, demonstrates a lack of even bare-minimum effort to convince the audience. Since this is a sports drama, we get, probably for the ten-thousandth time in the history of cinema, a training montage. This trope, much like the rest of the movie, is quite stereotypical – except for split screens trying to make it look ‘different’. In fact, Mehra isn’t directing such a segment for the first time. His 2013 film, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (also starring Akhtar), had a similar stretch set to a song (also scored by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy), where a tormented athlete subjected himself to a punishing regime (also featuring tires and ropes).

Like Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Toofan manufactures simplistic villains to mould our sympathies. Aziz’s final opponent, a brawny figure with a murderous stare, doesn’t even look like a person. A bigger villain (Darshan Kumar) – once defeated by Aziz, now a boxing federation official – resurfaces with a glass eye. The dude could have tattooed “douchebag” on his forehead, and even that would have been more subtle. Besides, the climactic twist, centered on Evil Eye and Nana, is so predictable and ludicrous that even mediocre film students would have discarded it from their first drafts. Yet it bookends Toofan like a badge of honour, marking a new chapter in Bollywood embarrassment.

Mirzya is a Failed Attempt at Traversing Time

Director Om Prakash Mehra’s contemporary take on an old Punjabi folktale leaves much of Mirzya stranded between two worlds, leaving the viewer unimpressed.

Director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s contemporary take on an old Punjabi folktale leaves much of Mirzya stranded between two worlds, leaving the viewer unimpressed.

Mirzya poster. Credit: Facebook

Mirzya poster. Credit: Facebook

Most Bollywood filmmakers treat time as a plot convenience, shrinking its importance, glossing over its true meaning and power – as if it doesn’t even exist, as if its presence, especially its long passage, has no bearing on people. These filmmakers don’t believe that their characters can undergo slow transitions such as coming to terms with newer versions of themselves, negotiating new realities, unlearning and maybe even forgetting things from the past to make the present more bearable and less unhappy. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Mirzya, starring Harshvardhan Kapoor and Saiyami Kher, is one such film.

Munish (Kapoor) and Suchitra (Kher) grow up together in Jodhpur and fall in love. At an early age, though, they part ways and meet after a long time when Munish, now called Adil, is working as a hired help, and Suchitra is about to get married to a local prince.

At one point in the movie, the two leads, Adil and Suchitra, meet each other after a long time and while Adil recognises Suchitra,  she fails to recognise him. In a different time and a different place, Adil was Munish, Suchitra was Suchi and they shared a close relationship with each other as classmates, best friends and lovers. However, after at least a decade, when Suchitra, who’s engaged to someone else, finds out that Adil is Munish, it just takes her a few ordinary meetings with him to fall in love with Adil again. And Adil, like a true Hindi film hero, never stops being in love with her. But this plot point doesn’t ring true, as, quite clearly, they are two different people now. The difference in their social standing (Suchitra belongs to a rich, influential family; Adil’s employed by her fiancé) is more pronounced than ever. Suchitra left Jodhpur (where she studied with Munish) at an early age and possibly went to premier schools and colleges, while Munish remained in Rajasthan. Suchitra’s also someone who, as it were, has studied, travelled and, seen the world; Munish hasn’t.

But Mehra doesn’t treat these differences with any gravitas, maybe because he doesn’t see them as people; he sees them as characters because he’s too fixated on making an epic. Time and again, right from the film’s first opening shot, we are reminded – through paintings on the wall, through voiceovers – that this is the story of Mirza and Sahiban (a popular Punjabi folk tale). And it is this story that fundamentally intrigues Mehra, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. Instead of locating the story in its original setting and time, Mehra attempts a contemporary adaptation (an audacious choice), but it’s clear, in scene after scene after scene, that he can’t let go off its mythic quality, can’t forget the fact that he’s adapting an epic. As a result, much of Mirzya along with its characters is stranded between two distinct worlds, two distinct spirits – old and new, extraordinary and ordinary, mythic and real – and the abrupt shift between the two doesn’t help the film.

Quite bizarrely, Mehra also keeps cutting to another story – set in an undefined time and place (and featuring horses, arrows, mountains, lakes and trees) – to hammer home the point that Mirzya is Mirza, Suchitra Sahiban and Mirzya not any other ordinary Bollywood film. Spoiler alert: It completely is.

Mirzya tries too hard to be profound, when, in fact, it can’t even tell a compelling story. Here, Mehra comes across as someone awfully short on confidence: Mirzya just doesn’t believe in silence; any scene of borderline emotional heft is underscored by songs; strange communal carnal dance routines; Daler Mehndi’s frequent wails which sound like a kid both angry and hungry. In fact, these interruptions are so frequent, inane and annoying that it makes warming up to this film nearly impossible. Even the writing here – story and screenplay by Gulzar – is slipshod and uninspired (inconsistent pace, mood, lack of focus), clichéd (Suchitra’s fiancé, to no one’s surprise, ultimately becomes the film’s villain) and inane (perfectly ordinary, if a little stuck up, people end up becoming gun-toting bloodthirsty goons by the climax).

To their credit, the debutants, Kapoor and Kher, play their one-dimensional poorly written roles fairly well, but this poor excuse of a film, cannot, and should not, be an estimation of anyone’s talent.