Sly Stallone is his role model

Bollywood films, I’m afraid, afflict their viewers with the ninety-minute itch. They often start out promisingly but lapse into dead cliché after intermission. It’s almost as if the initial scribe, having collected his payment, departed in Qualis hastily, leaving his undertaker understudy to stretch the premise to the conclusion.

Gangster and Fanaa both fall prey to this curse. Gangster begins with a procession of glorious images fresh to these non-film student eyes: a gun shot shot in extreme Z axis, a rowboat, black waters, South Korea, and the preternaturally femme graces of Kangana Ranaut, who in real life is only 19. Its sleek cinematography cuts pure celluloid with cherry blossoms, a Korean country house and a Zen-like purity of composition.

Which is why it’s all the more tragic that the movie lapses into shrieky melodram. Shiney Ahuja and his inner voice Matte channel Sly Stallone and play gangster as a mentally challenged pugilist. This being a Hindi flick, all subtlety must be obliterated; the killer must be turned into a one-note saint. Ahuja plays the Sati-Savitri role traditionally reserved for a sniveling Madhuri Dixit. Droopy-faced Emraan Hashmi mopes across the screen (why exactly is this man a star again?) By the end your eyes are exhausted from all the rolling and you can’t propel your gluteus out of the theater fast enough.

Alhough retreading love story tropes, Fanaa begins with promise. It’s Aamir Khan, Kajol Mukherjee, ass-kicking tabla and rock guitar and delicious flirting in verse. The woman-child from the heart-stopping ‘Suraj Hua Madham‘ sets her unibrowed Bangla gaze ablaze. Aamir plays his practiced lothario from Rangeela; Kajol is intrinsically so charismatic, you forgive her the blind girl cliché and begin rooting for the film.

Then the inevitable happens: a miraculous eye operation of the kind which only occur in Hindi cinema, a blatant auditory rip of the Mission Impossible theme, lifts from XXX and Alias, lazy coincidences, a universe populated with only a handful of people who somehow keep running into each other, situations which make no sense… Bollywood suffers from an exaggerated version of Hollywood syndrome: the glossmakers are highly paid, while screenwriters seem hired as afterthoughts.

A modest proposal: Bollywood filmmakers should cut the part after the intermission. It’s just an excuse to graft a totally different genre into the movie, executed so badly that ‘disjointed’ would be a compliment (c.f. Rang De Basanti). Screenwriters would pen only the A sides, we’d get to see only the good stuff, and there would be no pressure for an idiotic eye operation to set up the heroine for the final ninety. I’ll take my scripts premium, not Costco.

Update: Amardeep blogs Fanaa here.