Unspeakable
Nishabd (Speechless), a Lolita remake with Amitabh Bachchan and newcomer Jiah Khan, proves that RGV, a master of brutally efficient, frame-dropping gangster movies, is artless with love. He slams saas-bahu serials in the movie yet resorts to the same lame 360º shots and repetitive, ear-blasting score. He’s known for his taut action flicks, but this one’s full of a whole lot of nothing. I fear for any women he’s actually attempted to seduce. Even the casting couch demands a little finesse out of courtesy.
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Unspeakably bad |
The teen tart typology is upside-down in this film. The ads say Jiah’s 18, which moots the whole point of Lolita, but she’s as giggly and asinine as a boy-band-loving 8-year-old. Lolita is about the forbidden, but in Nishabd, explicit declarations of love precede the hanky-panky. It’s the classic Indian sexual hypocrisy. Nabokov will be spinning in his grave.
With this film, it took me 15 minutes to start reading Slashdot on the cell phone, 25 before Khan starts wrestling a squirting garden hose between her legs and 30 before I started counting down to intermission, at which point I left to salvage my sanity. It’s always a bad sign when reading the NYT on a Saturday night is vastly more interesting than watching a fine young thing on screen. Khan, who promoted the film at PVR Juhu last night, carries a mane of curly brown hair and in short shorts vaguely reminds me of M.I.A. The way RGV desexualizes her with this crap love story is criminal. That it forced me to leave before any screen badmashi is tragic. It’s like a lunar eclipse.
This flick and the ludicrous Joggers’ Park (Victor Banerjee, Perizaad Zorabian) paint a tawdry picture of faultless, faithful middle-aged men seduced by young vixens who made them do it against their will. Or something. There are many things to recommend about Hindi cinema; a sensitive or even interesting treatment of May-December is not one of them. And I’m quite bored with Bachchan shot through blue filters, the sad-eyed lion in winter. Even some of the atrocious ham from Black might have livened up this putridness.
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Yeah, it’s that subtle |
My buddy Anuvab and his better half, born into artsy Bong families, have seen all the Hindi and Bengali classics and are forever inviting me to tepid art flicks. Yesterday I gloated that I had finally gone more highbrow-than-thou: while I was off watching The Last King of Scotland’s Indian premiere, they were watching Jude and Cameron meet cute in The Holiday. ‘I’m not worried,’ Anuvab joked, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘You’ve sat through Deewane Huye Paagal and Ankahee. You’ll see something tomorrow that sets things right.’
My finest hour lasted only twenty-four.
on Sunday, March 4th, 2007, 1:22 am in Film › 
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i have just one thing to say: MYUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!
signed,
better half of a. pal.
NISHABD is bad cinema in every way-I agree that Indian cinema should progress beyond its mishmash of candyfloss love stories, boring gangster dramas, star-driven junk stuff etc - but are movies like NISHABD actually providing quality variety fare? is it logical by any standards to assume that a 64 yrs old man would ‘fall in love’ with a 19-year old ? and that too when the 19-year old is shown as someone strutting around with her long legs and skimpily clad ? two things can possibly happen -either the 64-yr old man would ask the 19year old to behave herself, or, he would be strongly driven by his testosterone! and how can this be showcased as poetic love! the trauma that Vijay undergoes is sheer lust, period, a desire trigerred by seeing something young, tender, juicy and supple, and not something platonic at all - but RGV wants us to believe it that way, which is like serving a very well-cooked polythene bag of basmati rice, instead of the rice itself! this simply is not the direction Indian cinema should be taking - being unconventional is fine, but being illogical is taking the intelligence of an average filmgoer for a ride! all those 60plus oldies travelling in buses in metro cities dont ‘fall in love’ when they oogle at young dames - nor is there anything even remotely platonic about oldies desiring to be in the company of younger women - lack of courage to show things as they are is where our filmmakers fail - and to top it all, the dumb tagline, “some love stories are not meant to be understood” - how about this “some stories are not meant to be made into movies, if they dont have logic in them” - that would be more appropriate - not just RGV, it is AB too, who has taken all of us for a clean dumb-s*ckers ride - in one interview he says
“senility is not the end of desire”, thus making “desire” the central issue of this movie, while all of our critics go gaga over this not being about ‘desire’ but about ‘emotions/love’ - give us all a frigging break! at this rate, we will never ever get out of the rut of filmmakers making bad cinema in the name of intelligent cinema, while movies like NISHABD insult our intelligence
Just rm -rf Nishabd! Bakwas movie. Bollywood wake up!!! If you do this type of movie long way to get an Oscar!