Film Review: Matru Ki Bijli Ka Mandola

Starring Pankaj Kapoor,Shabana Azmi, Imran Khan, Anushka Sharma, Aarya Babbar Directed by Vishal Bharadwaj Rating: *** There is plenty of singing and dancing in this whimsical serio-comic drama about a landlord who when inebriated, becomes one among the peasant class hollering for the blood of the bloodsuckers ,and when sober becomes a tyrant who pushes around his driver-cum-man-Friday with a gusto that most moviegoers would recognize as a sign of power gone to the head. Quite like the director Vishal Bharadwaj whose work has given him a kind of arrogant authoritativeness over his material. Vishal is the lord of all he deigns to survey, make no mistake about that. His baggy narrative canvas accommodates a shrewish wily politician (Shabana Azmi, brilliant), a pink cow (why pink, no one knows!), a pink-dressed female cow (Navneet Nishan), Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. Like Kajol in Chopra’s DDLJ (the longest-running film in the history of Indian cinema) Anushka Sharma is all set to marry the wrong guy, the lady politician’s duh-huh son (Aarya Babbar) who orders Zulu dancers for his girl because he heard her say she likes African music. What if she had said she liked Pandit Ravi Shankar’s Sitar! Those Zulu performers cling on to the film’s wide canvas to the end, popping up here and there with embarrassing tenacity. The boorish suitor that Babbar plays was played by the likes of Mohnish Behl in the past. By the time Anushka lands up dead drunk on the mandap to marry the land-grabbing jerk Dady Dearest has selected for to be her lawfully chosen bridegroom, we know this film, like Pankaj Kapoor’s split character, is trying to further its personality as a quirky whimsical avant-garde film by turning conventional clichés of mainstream Bollywood cinema on their head. So we get characters who look and smell familiar. But because the director is Vishal Bharadwaj they appear to occupy a space far away from the madding crowd of pedestrian potboilers we’ve grown up watching. Like Karisma Kapoor in Anari Anushka Sharma loves her family’s Man-Friday who, surprise surprise, is a closet Maoist espousing land-grabbing liberation for his villagers, mouthing communism with a vigour that should have fuelled much ‘feud’ for revolutionary thought. Matru and Bijili and Mandola’s story remains stuck in a region of half-realized possibilities. These are characters here suffused with a warmth and affection that don’t quite render themselves to a cohesive narration. The plot and the characters meander to scattered zones of expression where they seem to be not as comic in their self-importance as they script meant them to be. At times the film looks like a panoramic street play with the characters brimming over with a ripe and urgent moral righteousness. At other times, the people inhabiting Vishal Bharadwaj’s films appear strangely incomplete, as though their inner world was left to work itself out after God initiated a beautiful process of evolution. The music by Vishal Bharadwaj too lacks that scintillating sparkle that took the director’s Omkara and Kaminey to a special level of poetic expression. Matru... remains at best a harvest of possibilities with the crop coming undone before ripening . The editing is deliberately lazy, as though the brilliant Sreekar Prasad was told to go easy on the plot’s loose-limbed design. The performances range from the masterly to the wishy-washy, with Shabana Azmi’s wily politician act taking the lead. Pankaj Kapoor’s author-backed role is marred by a slurring schizophrenia. His character is as unsure of his politics as Vishal Bharadwaj is sure of his. Imran tries...oh , he tries hard to look like a rustic Man-Friday with a toughened exterior and a heart of gold, aviators suggesting a marriage of the rustic and the urbanized. But it is at best a good effort. And really, how many times must we watch Anushka Sharma play the bubbly chirpy bindaas girl whom love tames into a teary-eyed submission after intermission? The best sequence between Imran and Anushka is the one where he unknowingly clasps her hand while talking to her about love and related stuff. That sequence demonstrates a freedom from the spirit of iconoclasm that grips the film from its first frame. Bharadwaj’s cinematic language is boldly untried, cutting and compelling. But the narration lacks lucidity. This is a work that had the potential for greatness. Like one of those products of Jawaharwlal Nehru University who goes astray with his politics, Matru Ke Bijli...remains at best, a film of infinite ideas, at worst a work as sloshed and rambling as Pankaj Kapoor’s character .