Shubhra Gupta

A film scored by A R Rahman, no less, cannot, in all honesty, be called a silent film. It can also be a big reason for drawing us into a film labelled a silent comedy, because music is key to telling us what words cannot. But looks can be deceptive. Let me warn you, this is two hours of drivel. How on God’s good earth did Rahman get inveigled into a project so vacuous? That’s a mystery which is destined to go unsolved; meanwhile, let me inflict upon you the misery I had to undergo.

Bikini Killer Charles Sobhraj, as he was gleefully dubbed by the tabloid press because many of his early hippie-trail victims were attired thus, never goes out of vogue. Just when you think there can’t be yet another iteration of his life and amazingly criminal times, up he pops again. Earlier this year, we had his character appear in a web-series (Black Warrant) ensemble; now he’s sharing equal space in a feature based on the exploits of real-life cop Madhukar Bapurao Zende who nabbed the dreaded criminal from Goa’s famed O Coqueiro restaurant. This is not myth, as many spin-off Sobhraj stories inevitably were; it is fact, causing the eatery to become a local landmark.

Amongst the most rewarding things about Songs of Paradise, which tells the story of Radio Kashmir’s first female singer, Padmashree Raj Begum (‘inspired by’ is the standard caveat) is watching Saba Azad play the lead role, with pleasing strength and vulnerability. The other is the attention paid to the music, which feels authentic. There’s no Bumro-Bumro over-orchestration, the accompanists keeping to what they need to do. Azad’s Noor Begum comes across as a young woman of the 50s, not an actor trying to do period, the costuming and the body-language feeling as if it could well have belonged to that era. The film opens with a young scholar (Tarruk Raina) trying to interview the older version of Noor, played by the wonderful Soni Razdan. Why, she asks. So that her story may be told to a generation which has forgotten her. In her time and in her kind of conservative Muslim family — her father is tailor who stitches women’s garments, and her mother (Sheeba Chadha, excellent as ever) keeps the home fires burning — there was no question of a ‘respectable girl’ not only singing, but making a profession of it, even if one of the most respected teachers (Shishir Sharma) of ‘mausiki’ thinks that she has a voice which the world needs to hear.

Punjabi ‘munda’ meets Malayali ‘penkutti’ in Param Sundari, and everything happens by the numbers. End of story. Wait, there’s 136 minutes of the film, which struggles to find both the rom and the com, from the beginning to the end, finding its feet only towards the last half an hour. By which time Param (Sidharth Malhotra) and Sundari (Janhvi Kapoor) have finished with their meet-cute in a small Kerala town homestay, gone into the long second act which perks up only when such supporting actors Manjot Singh (hero’s BFF) and Renji Panicker (the heroine’s brusque uncle) show up, finally fetching up at their DDLJ moment, where you can see the spark, fleetingly, between the good-looking leads.

It’s raining spies everywhere you turn, but it’s in ‘Tehran’ that you actually get a sense of what the work entails– it could mean putting in long, hard hours in nondescript offices, and the field operations that are shown as fast-paced car-and-copter-chases in the movies is, in this John Abraham-starrer, mostly about learning how to hide in plain sight, even as the danger of betrayal looms at every step. Abraham plays Rajeev Kumar, an intelligence officer who gets embroiled in the dirty business involving two foreign nations, Israel and Iran, on Indian soil. A blast in New Delhi results in the death of a little girl, a bystander with zero stakes in the long-standing conflict in the Middle East, and RK finds himself moving from the periphery to the centre. It’s no longer about the job; it is now personal.

The hardest thing about this show is also the easiest. Once you accept the fact that heightened hokeyness is key to both the characters and the construct, you begin admiring the straight-faced seriousness with which everyone gets with the plan, with nary an eye roll or giggle in sight. Without giving too much away, and I suppose I couldn’t even if I wanted to, so outlandish is everything, the ‘andhera’ in the title turns out to be a malevolent entity which threatens to enslave human-kind. It has wriggly tentacles which probe and fasten, whisking victims away into a never-never land where they lie in suspension, neither dead nor alive, mere husks.

Rogue spy Kabir is back, and this time around, he has a bigger task cut out for him. Perhaps the most difficult, says his father-figure mentor Colonel Luthra, a description which turns out to be prophetic. Yes, the task, to keep us glued to the screen, which is the solo ask of a fast-paced actioner, turns out to be not just difficult, but impossible. I’m sorry to report that War 2, the sixth instalment of the YRF Spy Universe, is nothing but a glossy snooze-fest.

It’s not the fault of this series that it comes exactly a week after the one which had the same theme. Well, almost. Salaakar is about scotching Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions with the help of canny footwork by Indian spies : this week’s new show on Netflix, Saare Jahaan Se Accha, created by Gaurav Shukla and directed by Sumit Purohit, is exactly about the same thing. The intent may be the same but the treatment, thankfully, is vastly different: the beyond-terrible Salakaar, with Naveen Kasturia leading the charge, reminds you of a comic-book with none of the fun of the genre; this Pratik Gandhi starrer, on the other hand, takes things seriously, and that’s a good thing, more or less.