Ishq - kya?

Ah. So this is what happens to folks who begin to blog and then get snowed down :-)

More than not having the time to write, with me, its been a case of not having the mind space to reflect on anything. But today, I opted out of the circus of my own life and dipped into the world of Abhishek Choubey via Ishqiya (much later than most people in Hindi-speaking India, I suspect).

Having finally watched the film, I decided to give my gray cells (and red ones) a two-paisa workout over what I saw. Here it is.

Spoiler alert: In writing about my reaction to the film, I might end up giving away parts of the plot. So, forewarned...

It's a loose, unfinished film.

It had many of the ingredients needed to become a great film - good production design, aka 'the look' of the film, original dialogues, two and a half great songs & good actors - but botched it up big time - in the writing and editing departments (and some in background score).

There was a feeling of slack throughout and as a viewer, I never got under the skin of the protagonists; there was no room in the two dimensions that they were portrayed in.

Of the main trio, (you can read the synopsis here, on the film's official website) Krishna (Vidya Balan) is best etched out emotionally (relatively speaking). She's complex, but the film spends some time on what she feels and why she acts the way she does. So, if you're kind willing to understand and are bent on your film ticket paisa-wasool, you can get her (as in understand her character...only Arshad Warsi's character Babban GETS her, without the Director giving us any clear reasons :-)

Naseeruddin, as Khalujaan (Babban's mama), comes in second on the on-screen character-development scale, but only on a single dimension - that of an old man falling in love with a much younger Vidya. Babban (Arshad Warsi) follows quickly, the shallowest of the three on this screen writing aspect.

The script lets them all down big time - they are caricatures of themselves, 2d cut-outs.

The film ran for close to two hours and I felt pretty sure that it could have been a good ten minutes shorter at least. Or, to put it more accurately, it felt like you could take out half hour of irrelevant screenplay and put in twenty minutes of relevant stuff and make everyone happy.

Strands of screenplay that began with promise got lost and cost the film precious time, without giving it back anything (a caste war between thakurs and other castes that could have got our protagonists into big trouble, for instance). Other bits were just plain bizzare, almost like plants by a Director seeking cult-status through maverick inserts (the old woman torch bearer who appears to set things ablaze in the climax...what was that? Some deep symbolic feminist revenge?)

There were good comic dialogues ("tumhara ishq ishq aur humara ishq sex?") and bad, but despite the earthy, original sounding writing, it all felt a little rarified and self-serving... topsoil only. (chutiam sulphate included)

Since I am on a rant now, I must express my anguish at hearing Vidya Balan do an "earthy, Bad Western UP woman". So much hype around it, it make me a little nauseous. In most of the film, she has no UP accent or to more precisely, she has the accent of a convent-educated south Indian trying hard to not have a convent-educated south Indian accent in her Hindi.

She succeeds for the most part, but that's still a couple of states away (both geographically and existentially) from having a Western UP accent. So, is she "Bad?" Yes. On this aspect, quite.

The best scene of the film comes a minute or so after after Khalujaan walks in to discover that his bhanja Babban has boldly gone where many men have gone before, ie, inside Vidya's petticoat.

Shortly after, the three no-gooders set out to kidnap a rich industrialist. Having dropped Arshad off en-route as part of the plan, Naseer and Vidya find themselves alone in the Maruti Omni. Vidya senses Naseer's seething anger and suspects something is amiss, but is not sure if it's her romp in the hay with the nephew that's set old romantic Khalujaan off.

The tension begins to build up beautifully as the she begins to bait him into conversation. An old Hindi film song begins to play on the music system and she says "S.D", indicating that she thinks the composer is S.D.Burman. He responds with "Hemant Kumar". The scene goes on, quite nicely, and I don't want to spoil it for those of you who may not have watched the film yet. Sadly, the point of going into these details is merely to drive home an earlier point - Vidya's atrocious accent.

Each time Vidya Balan says "S.D" in this exchange it makes my skin crawl - it so so urban, so not-Western UP and that I have to do a rapid "All ij well" to myself to reset my brain and enjoy the rest of the scene.

Okay. Enough said.

Net-net: It was like a bad screen adaptation of a good novel, where the screenplay cuts out major portions of the story (especially character development), leaving the film a sad, vaguely familiar shell of it's (in this case, could-have-been) great print version.

I'm sure I would have liked the book better.