Review Time!

I know I'll make a horrible music/cinema journalist - the sort that reviews music and movies week after week. The profession requires you to react quickly to something, and spew out length-bound opinions. I can't do that, because I have a theory. (God, I'm so full of doddi.)

There's three kinds of art. One that makes no impact on you at all. The second that makes immediate impact, but disappears into the recesses of your memory soon. The third makes some (or even no) impact on the first attempt, but stays with you, haunts you and begs you to come back for seconds, thirds and (on occasion) infinites. Then, there is that insignificant minority that catches you by the balls the first time around and lives with you for ever. Most art falls somewhere in between these categories. (I know I said three categories and ended up with four. It was intentional. I'm a Douglas Adams fan. Or, you could count the first sentence as tisram, and the rest of the paragraph in chaturasram. Ok, forgive me for that random Carnatic joke. God, I'm so full of doddi.)

Now, when you write a movie review on Friday evening, after having watched the movie on Friday morning, anything that is in category 1 gets dismissed immediately, anything in category 2 gets elevated to category 3 (Rang De Basanti, for instance), lots of things in between categories 2 and 3 get interchanged, and anything in category 4 gets just deserts. (No. The spelling of the word is not 'desserts' in this context. Check this out. (God, I'm so full of doddi.)

See what happened with Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya - the first time I heard it, I thought, Bleddy Hell. Rahman's taken his structurelessness too far. And then I heard it again. And again, and again. Until structures, forms, meanings were discovered, and Mannippaaya became a better song than Aaromale. I know Rahman's music very well. Hell, I know Rahman's music better than I know Tyagaraja's (I've listened to Rahman uninterruptedly since Roja, circa 1992, but there was a long gap where I heard almost no Tyagaraja). But the dude's managed to surprise me again - with that naadaswaram in Omana Penne, with some fresh hip-hoppy stuff from Blaaze in Hosanna, that bluesy-angsty-Malayali singing in Aaromale, and the sheer uncatchability of Mannippaaya. (One mustn't forget the lovely vocals in the title song.) He's also surprised me with two doddi songs - I mean, what is with Anbil Avan and Kannukkul Kannai?! Why are they even in the same galaxy?

Just a couple of additional things about Mannippaaya. (God, I'm so full of doddi.) Shreya Ghoshal's Tamil accent is getting better by the day, and her voice, oh man, so pretty. There's many kinds of female voices, most of which I'm not too fond of. (Wait, Mary Wollstonecraft. Don't kill me. There's many kinds of male voices also, most of which I'm not too fond of.) Shreya Ghoshal's is the loveliest sort, really. Not too timbrous, not too shrieky. Fully in shruti, at all points of time. Really helps when you're negotiating a melody as complicated as Mannippaaya. And Ra-ghu-man, suppper only. That introduction line, "Kanne thadumaari nadanthen..." when he comes in with that high note, crooning. Abbah. Bliss only, it is.

Similarly with Ishqiya. I came out of the theatre too numb to talk. I mean, one can take only so much of Vidya Balan playing a sexual manipulator and still remain coherent and sane. If I had to write a review in two hours' time, I would've praised the movie to the skies, flooded paragraphs with superlatives, fantasised about Vidya Balan and collapsed under the excitement. But I exercised restraint - for two days. Today, my opinion is slightly different. The movie has its stretches of brilliance. (No, I don't use that term lightly. I mean it. There were stretches of brilliance - the way she dangles the two men was outstanding! You could feel Kalujaan's tender love and Babban's erotic infatuation (as Babban puts it, "Tumhara isqh, aur hamara ishq sex?"), and Krishna's perfect understanding of what both of them want. But there was the rest of the movie - a convoluted plot where nobody's motive was made clear. The dude playing the husband did a very good job of hiding a confused character's shallowness. And the lady's voice over the phone was, as one Mr. Happy put it, 'an unnecessary device'.

Even so, Ishqiya was a very good film. That "Mamta ko dhoka nahin de sakta" scene, "chuttar dhone se pahele bandook chalana seekh jata hai", that scene where they dance to "Dekha jo Tujhe yaar", the addition of chutiyum sulphate to my vocabulary, all makes it a great movie. But some coherence, some consistency, and it could have been God-level.

Ishqiya continues, in an equally engaging manner, a genre started by Manorama: Six Feet Under - of rural, desi noir (or, as Jabberwock put it once, phillum noir). That one was quieter, more brooding, less quirky and more dangerous. This one is funnier, edgier and madder. But both deserve more attention than they're getting.

In the end analysis, neither Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya (the music), nor Ishqiya will form a part of me - unlike Thiruda Thiruda or Maqbool, but I will recollect both fondly. (God, I'm so full of doddi.)
***

a. Doddi means shit in Telugu/PD.
b. Yes. I invent words. I'm like Shakespeare.