Another world, a different time

Lok Parlok (T. Rama Rao, 1979) 

 

Oh, where do I even begin with Lok Parlok?

On the one hand, Lok Parlok is precisely what it looks like: a mildly insane crackfest starring Jeetendra in his prime.

Yes. Let's start with that.

The film begins with neighbours Amar (Jeetendra) and Kalincharan (Madan Puri) at war. Kalicharan, the current head of the village panchyat, a greedy, self-serving and apparently quite corrupt man, HATES Amar, because Amar is committed to justice, educates the local farmers on their rights and generally seems like a pretty good guy to have in your corner.

 It took me a while to figure out he means "nightingale" 

The two start out pettily killing each others pets (Kalicharan shoots one of Amar's pigeons; Amar retaliates by eating Kalicharan's prize rooster and sending him a box of feathers) but their enmity soon escalates when Amar announces that he will be running against Kalicharan in the upcoming village elections.

And obviously, because Amar is kind to the locals, and gives them information that actually SERVES them, instead of taking advantage and abusing them (ahem, KALICHARAN), Amar is the favourite to win, by A MILLION MILES. And so it goes. So the obvious thing for Kalicharan to do, faced with the Threat Of Amar, is to have him killed.

Oh yeah, Jaya Prada's in it. Also, that bandage Jeetu's sporting? He got it cracktastically wrasslin' a buffalo!

Enter my beloved Amjad Khan as a contract killer, who (reminiscent of that OTHER crackfest, Badle Ki Aag) goes by MANY names, and who has perfected some kind of...acupressure karate chop that kills instantly. 

 Oh yeah, the subtitles on my copy are TERRIBLE (adding to the hilarity). What Amjad my darling is actually saying is that "Overseas, I was known as the Boston Strangler"

Sure enough, Amar, foolishly wandering home alone in the dark one night, gets deftly karate chopped, and the next thing you know, his lifeless body is lying in Kalicharan's lounge, and Amar's spirit is ascending, accompanied by two slightly sinister otherworldly watchmen, up to Heaven.

Like so.

And that's where things get a little bit more nutso.

I mean, up until this point, the film has been a fairly ordinary – if somewhat heavily political (and trust me, WE'LL GET TO THIS) – example of old being gold. It's got freshfaced Jeetendra being even MORE freshfaced than usual, a wisecracking, idealistic good guy in the face of a clearly defined corrupt and greedy villain. It has one of my favourite things ever, a trope that seems to have died out: lovely, lingering, saturated colour shots of a variety of flowers, standing in for...well, WE ALL KNOW WHAT THE FLOWERS MEAN, RIGHT?

Sex. They mean SEX, people.

It has shots like this:

- look at the glorious rainbow! How much more wholesome and beautiful and just heartwarming can you GET?

Also, it has Jeetendra kicking ASS in a mad, gravity defying, totally ridiculously awesome brawl against a bunch of Kalicharan's hired goons and totally owning them.

My point is, up until Amar dies, Lok Parlok is basically fairly interchangeable with any 70s Bollywood film.

But then Amar ends up in Heaven, where he's told he'll only stay for a matter of hours, because his sins outweigh his virtues: he's due in Hell any minute.

One of the BEST things about Lok Parlok's depiction of Heaven is that you are greeted by a disembodied voice, not unlike that of an Arrivals announcer at an airport.

And the madness this ushers in is more than just some deliciously shonky special effects.

Ever the rebel, Amar takes being dead remarkably well: in fact, his first action in Heaven, where a dance recital is being performed, is to jump in and show the dancing goddesses just how out of date theirdance steps have become over the eons. Seriously. Amar is all about the butt wiggle and channelling part Elvis, part Shammi Kapoor, delighting in pissing off the tiny population of Heaven, before he gets sent to Hell, where he is apparently supposed to be.

Because he DANCES LIKE A DEMON.

And that is where Amar really gets to work. Ever the public defender, Amar becomes concerned with the conditions that the...I guess you call them demons?...are working under: Hell is understaffed, the demons don't get overtime, no-one has ever arranged proper shifts in the centuries the demons have been working, punishing the sinners. Amar takes it upon himself to unionise the demons, who – once they grasp the idea of strikes and unions – enthusiastically elect Amar their leader and march to Yamaraj (the God of Hell) to demand better conditions.

And then Amar pulls his next trick. When the Yamaraj and his assistant, Chitragupta, are confronted with the disgruntled demons en masse, Amar convinces them that it would be totally justified to just lock the gate to Hell for a while and go on holiday...but of course, Amar needs to go back to Earth for a while too, if that's okay with them? And that's what happens. Yamaraja and Chitragupta, the two characters least prepared for a sojourn on Earth, head off for an Earthly vacation (with predictable comic consequences). Amar heads back to Earth to take his revenge on Kalicharan (and IT'S AWESOME and more than a little cracked out – not least the part where Jeetendra DIGS HIMSELF OUT OF HIS OWN GRAVE). And with the doors to Hell locked, the striking demons shut inside, all over Earth, dead bodies COME BACK TO LIFE when the souls intended for Hell can't get in.

As a glitzy, special effects laden star vehicle alone, Lok Parlok succeeds in being extremely enjoyable. It's a lot funnier than you'd expect a film heavily focussed on death and politics to be; a lot of that has to do with the fish out of water antics of the Yamraja and Chitragupta as they play tourist on Earth, and in Amar's sneaky revenge tactics against Kalicharan and vice versa (Slight spoiler: it involves another of my favourite Bollywood tropes: DOUBLE ROLE! As well as playing the righteous, middle class Amar, Jeetu takes on the role of an hilarious illiterate chaiwalla named Ram Gupta, who Kalicharan employs to impersonate Amar to convince everyone that he didn't in fact murder Amar in cold blood...)

But the REALLY interesting thing is that this seemingly fluffy, silly, most cracktastic of films is actually operating on a whole other level as well.

First of all, it IS hard to ignore that the film, for a fluffy screwball comedy, does contain quite a heavy emphasis on politics. Even before Amar dies, unionises the demons in hell, and demonstrates to Yamaraj HOW HE CAN USE THE EXISTING CONSTITUTION (the book of Dharma) to justify a lockout, there's a strong focus on the political battle between Kalicharan and Amar for panchyat leader, and on the tactics employed by both sides to influence voting.

There are a lot of seemingly throwaway snide little comments too, that have not a lot to do with the plot onscreen, but obviously have SOME agenda behind them.

Which is, errr, pretty much what Indira Gandhi did when she declared Emergency. Giving herself absolute power and stripping the people of their basic civil rights.

It's worth remembering that India's Emergency only ended a couple of years before this film released. The Emergency was widely decried as “The Death Of Democracy” in India, and an argument can definitely be made that Amar symbolises “Democracy” in Lok Parlok.

There are so many sneaky, suspiciously on the nose references that with a bit of background reading (The Emergency is a bit more complicated than I can go into here, plus, like any historical event, perspectives vary) it becomes fairly obvious that Lok Parlok is a political satire, digging at the various, and (at the time of its release) very recent injustices and crimes of the government during the Emergency period.

Seriously. Jeetendra as political crusader. IT HAPPENED.

Marvellously mediocre

De Taali (Eshwar Niwas, 2008)

There used to be a free to air TV channel here in NZ that, for some reason or another, never had the 'good' movies. In the prime time slot, when the other channels were screening, I dunno, The Sopranos and 5 year old Hollywood blockbusters that everyone has heard of, this channel played, I swear on my life, EVERY NIGHT, these gloriously mid 90s mediocre films apparently aimed firmly at Generation X. I cannot remember the title of a single one of them, because they were all pretty much interchangeable. They always starred some slacker guy played by Jason or Jeremy London (OMG REMEMBER THE LONDON TWINS?!) in a glamourous dot-com or advertising job, and basically nothing happened for two hours except people talked a lot, with a bunch of DATED POP CULTURE REFERENCES!, and there was inevitably some cute girl who Jeremy or Jason London would have coffee with and they'd wind up together. Mediocre? YOU BET.

Did I watch those movies EVERY GODDAMN NIGHT?

HELL YES.

I don't know what it is in my DNA, but I have a real soft spot for films that are perfectly average. There's something comforting and soothing about their ordinaryness. I'm not talking about kitschy badness or cracktastic levels of greatness; forget that for now, I'm talking perfectly ordinary, completely run of the mill, kind of forgettable films. The kind that play night after night on some random channel because, I don't know, the rights are cheap. The kind that some people pad the beginnings of their filmographys with, or that star one of those actors that make a career out of C grade films like these. The kind of film that despite its awesomeness, NOBODY has ever heard of. The kind that GET GIVEN AWAY FOR FREE WHEN YOU ORDER OVER A SET $ AMOUNT OF DVDS.

De Taali fits all of my incredibly specific criteria:

• I had never heard of it until I received it as a bonus free dvd with a dvd order
• It stars Riteish Deshmukh and Ayesha Takia – both lovely actors with decent films to come under their belts, although come to think of it, they tend to be found in ensemble films or as “second leads” WHICH JUST PROVES MY POINT;
• It also stars Aftab Shivdasani!!! (I LOVE AFTAB, SHHHHHH). This ups the glorious shameful pleasure factor x 400
• It is neither so terrible that it becomes cracktastic, nor so amazing it becomes ridiculous awesome. Apparently, on its release, it got pretty dismal reviews (although Riteish, quite deservedly, was singled out for a fantastic comic performance).
• It is merely fantastically, enjoyably average. AND I REALLY LOVE IT.

So. De Taali is a story of three friends: Paglu (Ritesh Deshmukh), Amu (Ayesha Takia) and Abhi (Aftab Shivdasani), who are super close – they even (although they are well into their twenties) have a “boys only” club-house (Amu is counted as an honorary boy, obviously).

Abhi is like...rich, with an indulgent businessman papa who gives him what the Sopranos would refer to as a “no show” job at the family business (basically, it doesn't matter much if he never turns up, he still gets paid). Abhi funds the the gang's random adventures like spur of the moment trips to Mauritius to go shark diving...except that he has a tendency to fall in love at the drop of a hat (or the blink of an eye) which means fun vacations are often put into jeopardy because of Abhi's lovesickness.

Paglu is the funny slacker member of the gang: he has NO job and gets out of paying the rent on his flat by (this is awesome) CONVINCING THE LANDLORD THAT HE IS A KING DEALING WITH A DISTANT WAR AND HIDDEN ENEMIES AND THUS HAS NO TIME TO THINK ABOUT THE PETTY REALITIES OF PAYING RENT.

And Amu – well, Amu is the sensible one. She also works for Abhi's dad (Anupam Kher) but SHE ACTUALLY DOES GO TO WORK, and takes it seriously, and is generally the voice of reason when Paglu and Abhi have harebrained schemes. Like sharkdiving in Mauritius.

So, the story really revolves around what happens when, after Abhi's wayward heart is broken by the latest in a string of WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE GIRLS (this one hilariously played by Neha Dhupia in a special appearance as a girl who talks to dead people) and well-meaning Paglu plants the seeds in Amu's mind that PERHAPS she and Abhi are perfect for one another. What follows is a case of inevitable misunderstanding as Amu convinces herself that a) she is in love with Abhi and b) that he is about to announce his love for HER.

In actual fact...things get slightly more complicated, because Abhi thinks he has already met the new love of his life: Kartika (Rimi Sen).

MEGA SPOILER ALERT (be warned:

Awesomely, the film suddenly veers from a romantic comedy about the tragedy of unrequited love between childhood friends, into having Paglu and Amu realise that Kartika is a massive gold-digger who has pretty much lied about EVERYTHING just to hook Abhi – in fact, she creates entire new identities to ensnare unsuspecting men for their assets. And when Abhi refuses to listen to his friends, and instead proposes to Kartika, PAGLU AND AMU ARE FORCED TO CLUMSILY KIDNAP AND TORTURE KARTIKA TO SAVE THEIR FRIEND.

ICING ON THE CAKE (possibly THE reason to see this film): there's a Big B themed party. And it's awesome.
 

Seriously, this film = THE BEST. SEE HOW RITEISH AND AFTAB DANCE THE BUTTERFLY DANCE!

Again, this week's theme troubles me, because I really have a total absence of shame about my extreme enjoyment of every facet of this production.

A short but sweet shameless pleasure

Watch this song (damn you embedding disabled!).

The bit where Akki slips over on the banana peel? STILL GETS ME EVERY TIME. I love watching him fall over. Like WHOA.

Life Partner

Shameless Pleasures Week 2012

Here's what I wrote back in 2010 when we did the first Shameless Pleasures Week (it was called “Shameful Pleasures” then, the name has since been changed to reflect the fact that none of us really feel much shame surrounding our choices). It sums up things pretty well: I still feel the same way.

IT'S MY FAVOURITE WEEK OF THE YEAR, YOU GUYS!

Life Partner (Rumi Jaffery, 2009)

I really have no excuse for liking this film as much as I do. THAT'S HOW SHAMEFUL PLEASURES WORK. In fact, here are some of the reasons I probably should really NOT like it:

1. Life Partner really is more likely to be described as “decidedly average” than anywhere NEAR approaching amazing. The plot is basically an exploration of contrasting modern (Indian) attitudes to relationships, told through the stories of Karan (Fardeen Khan) and Sanjana (Genelia D'Souza) who are married through a love match; Bhavesh (Tusshar Kapoor) and Prachi (Prachi Desai) who have an arranged marriage; and with their friend Jeet (Govinda) a divorce lawyer who thinks ANY marriage is a mistake, in the middle of things. Each couple runs into hurdles threatening the state of their “life partnership” - can the hurdles be overcome and Jeet proved wrong about marriage? is basically the thrust of the film.
   
   
   Or the whole thing can be summed up like this:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
    Oh lawyer Chi Chi, so smug.
   
   
2. You can forget justifying my insane love of the film with the fact that my all time favourite Hindi actor Govinda is in it. A) That's obviously not an argument in itself for a good film (need I even mention Naughty @ 40?) and B) Life Partner is one of a string of late period Chi Chi films where he abandons the star persona that worked so well for him so many years in so many films: the simple, rustic, slightly naïve and more likely to be devoutly religious guy, to basically play a sleazebag. It's pretty icky – Chi Chi's character is an extremely cynical divorce lawyer who is so good at his job, he can talk newlyweds into dissolving their marriages. His M.O. Is targeting the neglected or harrassed wives, and then “consoling” them when the divorce is finalised. 
    
   Yeah. I told you it was icky. 
    
3. Speaking of icky, this is the film in which Chi Chi's character hooks up with Amrita Rao, who is LITERALLY young enough to be his daughter. 
   
   
   
    
4. Genelia D'Souza, an actress I place on a par with Zooey Deschanel in terms of her ability to drive me to want to stick a fork in my eye by playing the same character type OVER AND OVER AGAIN, in Life Partner plays a character SO INCREDIBLY IRRITATING AND AWFUL it makes every other Manic Pixie Dream Girl look like a nuanced, subtle, award worthy performance. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   BUT. The character – Sanjana - is SO AWFUL, SO SO INCREDIBLY AWFUL it becomes just...super fun to hate her. In no other film do I actually look forward to Genelia's awful screeching onscreen. You know how there are characters you just LOVE to LOATHE? Sanjana is one of them, because, and this should explain it:
   
   
   SHE IS SO LOATHSOME YOU FEEL ACTUAL PALPABLE SYMPATHY FOR FARDEEN KHAN. Who is actually quite a sweet guy in this.
   
   
5. Oh yeah, aside from Govinda, the lead characters are played by Fardeen Khan and Tusshar (Kapoor). (I don't know why he goes for the one name credit, he's always gonna be Tusshar Kapoor, never just Tusshar - and the film even has an in-joke about his filmi family).
   
   
   
   
   
   
    For the uninformed - that would be Tusshar Kapoor's real life sister, Ekta Kapoor, well-known for producing soapy TV serials; and their dad is of course the glorious 60s/70s hero, Jeetendra.
   Now, I will get to this point again in a bit but objectively speaking: these names are not exactly known for filling theatres or inspiring confidence. 
    
6. In terms of awful characters there's also THIS GUY – Bhavesh's papa.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Again, it's another case of having a character be just so awful it's actually kind of enjoyable to hate them, but you know, I totally understand how your mileage may vary on this one.
   
   

But the thing is, I REALLY like this film. Like, I enjoy this film an embarrassing amount. It's one of those films I can happily watch from start to finish ENDLESS TIMES. If it is on TV, I WILL SIT DOWN AND WATCH TO THE END. Sometimes, out of the blue, I will get a yearning, a need to watch this one particular film. It's FULL of shameless pleasures.

1. I REALLY REALLY REALLY ADORE TUSSHAR IN THIS MOVIE. I have a mega soft spot for Tussh anyway, and think the guy gets treated a bit rough sometimes (um, hello, just watch Shor In The City, okay? He OWNS in that film) but his character Bhavesh in Life Partner is SCHO SCHWEET (well, up until the second half when he's not being a pathetic coward).
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
    My favourite part: when he starts CRYING when he finds out his marriage proposal has been accepted. IT'S SO CUTE.
   
   
2. You get to see The Most Annoying Manic Pixie Dream Girl Character IN HISTORY get yelled at by Saintly Fardeen Khan (who is justifiably mad, because in the course of the film, he gets up at 6am, does all the housework, goes to work to earn a living, comes home and has to cook for Sanjana, do more housework, is kept up partying all night by her and her friends, nearly crashes the car falling asleep at the wheel because when he put music on to keep his exhausted self awake Sanjana screamed at him “I'm SLEEPING”, AND THEN SANJANA – who doesn't have a job, do anything around the house except complain that her husband is not at her beck and call enough – BURNS DOWN THE HOUSE because she doesn't know how to turn the washing machine off). (Also, that's not even HALF of it). 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
    
3. And also, there's a WHOLE SONG dedicated to making fun of her.

I love this film. Not even ashamed.