No grey matter
Black & White
BLACK & White is a prime example of an old-style director casting about new ways to stay relevant. A suicide bomber arriving in New Delhi, primed to create murder and mayhem on Independence Day, is unlike anything Subhash Ghai has ever made.
Very briefly, right in the beginning, with stark black-and-white scenes of a terrorist plot being hatched, it looks as if Ghai is on to a good thing. But too soon you know that he is in double trouble. The plot isn’t exactly novel, and the treatment, archaic. The film divvies up its characters into round holes and square pegs, gets them to mouth clichéd lines, delivering them, and us, into a clumsy, improbable climax.
Numer Qazi (Anurag Sinha) is smuggled into the cloistered confines of Chandni Chowk in the first week of August. His mission is to blow himself, and scores of people, at the I-Day celebrations at Lal Qila. To that end, he befriends affable professor Rajan Mathur (Anil Kapoor), and his activist wife Roma (Shefali Shah), a couple well-known and well-loved in the locality—he can quote ayaats from the Koran, chapter and verse, and she fights for the rights of burqa-clad women within the walled city.
There was enough potential here for a cracker of a film, because there will always be space for movies which explore the psyche of a terrorist, given the times we live in. But the situations and dialogues creak. Ghai’s characters don’t speak, they declaim. Rajan quotes Ghalib to his students (he teaches, appropriately, at Zakir Hussain College) in a scene reminiscent of the movies of the ‘70s. And Roma is to be forever seen in fabindia tussar saris, tussling with kohl-eyed, skull-capped youth. The talented actress deserved better. The same problem afflicts promising first-timer Sinha as the implacable suicide bomber who shoots co-conspirators dead for not being good Muslims—all frown-and-scowl, and not much else.
Only Kapoor, who has worked with the director before, rises effortlessly above it all, with both heft and nuance to his performance. There’s a scene in which he has to sit by his dead wife’s body ; instead of going to pieces, he launches into a long-winded explanation about Hindu-Muslim unity as his terrified little daughter looks on. Only Ghai could have written it, and only Kapoor could have done it, without being laughed out of the hall.
Thumbs up for Ghai-the-producer, especially when he backs movies like Iqbal. But Ghai-the-director needs a second wind.
SHUBHRA GUPTA
The Prequel
10,000 BC
“ONLY time can teach us what is truth and what is legend.” This bit of fake-folk wisdom commences the voice-over narration of 10,000 BC, and the more you think about it, the more preposterous it seems. If anything, time confuses the issue. Even as the story begins, the old ways seem to be dying out, as the Yagahl, a tribe of snuffleupagus hunters who favour extensions in their hair and eschew contractions in their speech, prepare for their last hunt. Along the way D’Leh and Tic’Tic have many adventures, involving bizarrely costumed humans and computer-generated creatures, among them a scary race of flesh-eating swamp ostriches. Meanwhile, back in the present, there is an awful lot of high-toned mumbo-jumbo to sit through. But the big, climactic fight, complete with an epic snuffleupagus rampage, is decent action-movie fun. And as a history lesson, 10,000 BC has its value. It explains just how we came to be the tolerant, peace-loving farmers we are today, and why the pyramids were never finished.
AO SCOTT/NYT
P. S. Run
P.S. I Love You
IT would be easy to dismiss P.S. I Love You, about the agonies visited on a young married couple, as the big-screen equivalent of a paperback romance. Movies that make you bawl were sometimes called five-hankie weepies, a sneery label calculated to insult the film and the teary filmgoer alike. There aren’t a lot of these made anymore in America, mainly because most of our movies now are about men and not women. Even so, there are plenty of covert male weepies, films that transform emotions into actions, including acts of violence. P.S. I Love You is more obviously a weepy, but because it leavens sorrow with laughter, it probably requires no more than three hankies. I wouldn’t know: I just used the back of my hand.
P.S. I Love You looks squeaky clean and utterly straight and very much removed from the shadow worlds in which Hillary Swank has done her best work.
MANOHLA DARGIS/NYT
