March 8, 1999
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CINEMA: FILM REVIEW Eerie Experience A suspense thriller with too many contrived horror tricks. By Anupama Chopra
To misquote Forrest Gump, director Ram Gopal Varma's films are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get. The Quentin Tarantino-style self-taught-by-watching-video director switches genres seamlessly. Relentlessly experimental, he moved from the MTV love story Rangeela to the spoof-gone-poof Daud to the gritty underworld saga Satya without a pause. In Kaun, Varma takes a shot at an Ittefaq-style songless suspense thriller and almost pulls it off. On a stormy night, a girl (Urmila Matondkar) is alone in a large house. The television announces that a psychopathic killer is on the loose. The door bell rings. It is a man (Manoj Bajpai), well-dressed but obviously edgy and perhaps even crazy. He worms his way into the house. Somewhere through the long evening, a second man (Sushant Kumar) joins in. He says he is a police inspector but he looks and behaves like a criminal. A nervous cat-and-mouse game of who is the psycho follows. In the end, two people lie slashed to death in the rain while the psycho grins, waiting for more victims. Varma, trying to create edge-of-the-seat suspense, pulls out the arsenal of shlock-horror tricks- appropriately timed thunder, even more appropriately timed power cuts, creaking doors, dead cats. The loud but superbly eerie background score by Sandeep Chowtha, who also did Satya, dictates the mood, almost becoming a fourth character. While Matondkar, all quivering lips and eyes wide with fear, is over the top, Bajpai is bang on. Veering between a nerdy salesman-type and a deranged killer, he keeps up the tension. But even at two hours, Kaun is too long. The film is shot in real time and the first half-full of red herrings and false alarms-seems to stretch interminably. Matondkar and Bajpai's verbal sparring becomes tedious. But writer Anurag Kashyap, also a Satya graduate, picks up the pace in the second half, adding much required doses of humour and working up to a startling denouement. The ending logic may not withstand close inspection but the shock value makes up for it. Alfred Hitchcock, the emperor of suspense, once remarked that his classic Psycho was a game with the audience. "I was directing the viewers. I was playing them like an organ." Varma doesn't quite achieve that but for viewers tired of watching cutesy college romances, Kaun is a reprieve. A lively, light-hearted non-preachy tale. By Anna M Vetticad Movie: Chalo
America
The story of Chalo America is simple. Three buddies in suburban Mumbai dream of going to the Promised Land. Marrying an NRI, stowing away on a ship-anything goes for these guys in their attempts to get to America. But it's not a movie on everything that's wrong with America but right with India. America here is a metaphor for quick-fixes. If there is a moral to this tale-and of course there is-then it's unobtrusive. Adman-turned-filmmaker Jha and Harshad Sharma, creative director at Sista Saatchi & Saatchi, have come up with a screenplay full of funny one-liners that could just as well have been the punchlines for their ads. Chalo America is refreshingly different, part of an emerging genre of Indian films (Bombay Boys, Hyderabad Blues), neither crassly commercial nor heavily arty-just sensible cinema. But Jha would do well to remember that tuneless songs, however cleverly inserted, are dispensable and that bad extras are bad news. Especially when compared to the charming main cast. Particularly Mandar Shinde. Attractive in a quiet sort of way, he's a natural. So is Jha |
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Movie: Kaun
If Piyush Jha had named his
film Three Boys and a Dream, it would have been just as apt. Good thing he didn't. Because
the man and his movie are all about attitude: that you can make a movie minus a
multi-crore budget, and make it fun. 
