Shanghai

Dibakar Banerjee is one of those contemporary star directors who have the gall to experiment and make a difference. He falls in the league of Anurag Kashyap, Farhan Akhtar, Imtiyaz Ali etc who are also directors who choose subjects that are not a variant of the numerous love stories that we have already seen. It is understandable that he seeks to do what Kubrick or Hitchcock did to cinema in the 50”s and 60’s. Khosla ka ghosla was his first attempt. He came into limelight with the comedy Oye Lucky Lucky Oye and then shot a completely unthought of movie in Love Sex aur Dhoka. All three movies are very very different from each other and LSD took cinematography to another level. So when you walk into a movie hall knowing it is a DB’s movie, you enter expecting something very new.

Shanghai is a story inspired by a book, Z. It is a political thriller set in contemporary times. It touches upon the controversial subject of land allocation for companies from overseas and also mocks innocently at a state that has a similar political structure and a lady at the helm of affairs. Why the name Shanghai still eludes me, but then my research on that topic isn’t adequate so I will give DB the benefit of doubt. There is a lot of similarity between a Kashyap movie and a DB movie. The difference in their approach is probably how Kashyap tells a story and how DB does it. Kashyap’s movies invariably have strong performances from actors and stars are made overnight. There is a lot of intensity and vigor about the movie. DB on the other hand is a very strong technical director. He prides in shots taken in unimaginable angles and his attention to detail is pretty amazing.

Apart from a couple of lines I haven’t touched anything about the movie at all. There is reason for that. Shanghai is woven with intricate details that come out one by one as the movie unfolds. Abhay Deol plays the collector of that district. He has a far more convincing fake Tamil accent than Shah Rukh Khan in Ra.one. Kalki Koechlin is the troubled student lover of Dr. Ahmedi played by Prosenjit Chatterjee. She was just doing a favor to a friend acting in that movie. She neither looks good nor does she deliver anything outstanding. She has a couple of intense scenes but they get so lost in the commotion that it doesn’t look like she is carrying it. Clearly the star of the movie is Emraan Hashmi. Strangely I have always been a fan of Emraan. He has done bad movies and some worse ones too. But he is a good actor who gets typecasted quite a bit. If DB showed faith in him then it is quite evident why. He does a stellar job in the role he has. The serial kisser comes into this movie with colored teeth and losing his 6 pack he had for Murder 2. He comes with a paunch and looks every bit a Rajasthani migrant. This is what DB does best. The finer details and technical aspects are done brilliantly like for example when Kalki calls him the caller id on his cellphone flashes “dreamgirl” spelt wrongly with a lot of lower case upper case mismatch.

The movie overall disappoints immensely. It is a drag that moves towards such an expected end that DB fails to surprise the audience. It is not an unusual story but the attempt is to tell it unusually. But the audience is hardly thrilled. You can take a nap and come back into the movie following it fully. Some scenes depict oversubtlety and some fall very flat. The dialogue delivery is painstakingly slow at places and you sometimes feel that this is how it would feel if time stood still. Somewhere in delivering a story in cinematic excellence, in great camera angles and delivering a subtle message, the movie loses out completely. It fails to keep the audience gripped and ends pretty blandly too. There is a lot of brilliance in the movie. Scenes like when Abhay Deol is praying and a flaming brick comes through the window are shot very well. But then you feel they have overdone it when you see a scene where the camera moves from a series of shutters to gaps where Kalki and Emraan are trying to hide. It isn’t great and doesn’t add any value except to the length of the movie. There are two very good music numbers in the movie, Dua and Khudaya. They do not feature in the movie. That pretty much sums up the movie.

In my review of LSD I had pretty much said this for DB and I repeat myself. A movie isn’t a collection of scenes it is a coherent record of events leading to a meaningful end. Somehow that end hasn’t been achieved.