Film: "Dirty Politics"; Cast: Mallika Sherawat, Om Puri, Naseeruddin
Shah, Jackie Shroff, Ashutosh Rana, Atul Kulkarni and Sushant Singh;
Director: K.C. Bokadia; Rating: *1/2
The pot-bellied grotesque
politician from Rajasthan used to be the face of politics in India at a
time when the Chautalas were doing their 'ghotalas'. With a new crop of
smarter netas, hopefully less susceptible to corruption, the era of the
'bad' politician seems blessedly behind us.
And that's precisely
why producer-director K.C. Bokadia's 'dirty' look at the filth in Indian
politics is hopelessly outdated. This is the murky Machiavellian world
of Prakash Jha's politicians stuck in a time-warp. Denuded of all
intellectual sensibility, it harks back to the 1970s when netajis in our
films were so caricatural that they belonged to cartoons in vernacular
newspapers.
Om Puri plays his role of the lecherous politician
with lip-smacking relish. Like a diabetic man whose wife is away to her
mother's house, while he gorges on forbidden junk food.
This is
junk food for the audience that believes cinema is about seductive
heroines, lascivious villains, loud over-punctuated background music,
camera angles and cinematography that seem to adhere to the gimmicky
treatment, like an annoying snivelling child clinging to its mother's
bosom.
Bokadia's cameraman Paneer Selvam seems to know exactly
what the director wants. Fleets of politicians' cars are shot in
high-speed to save time. Or is it to make the frames look more exciting
than they actually are? God knows, this film desperately needs a reason
to survive its lengthy playing time. Actors of the calibre of Atul
Kulkarni and Sushant Singh grapple with a script and lines that are so
outrageously didactic that they sound like messages written on the walls
of the loo at a government office visited week after week by tired
pensioners.
Curiously, Kukarni and Singh play honest policemen,
brothers named Nischay and Nirbhaya. Get it? They work together to
eradicate the dirt from politics. But who's going to clean out Indian
mainstream cinema from the lingering legacy of a distastefully pungent
past that films of this kind stubbornly cling to?
It is hard to
say which is a funnier sight. Mallika Sherawat trying to act in a sari.
Or Mallika Sherawat trying to act coy while Om Puri takes off her sari.
Either way she cuts a 'sari' figure trying to do what she was never cut
out to do - act.
As the dancer-turned-politician Anokhi Devi,
Mallika tries to compensate for her lack of acting chops with facial
vigour and physical energy.
There is a particularly unaesthetic
lovemaking sequence done in deliberately bad light which can't hide
Puri's flab and Sherawat's disinterest. Can a film about a horny
politician and a wily item girl be made without the two looking
interested in each other?
Reduced to the indignity of playing a
lecherous over-libidinous politician who has the hots for an ambitious
siren, Om Puri does what he can, given the constraints of a corny script
that relies on sleaze and shock value to get our attention. Other
talented actors like Naseeruddin Shah (playing an honest journalist
stuck with a daughter whom the politicians kidnap), Anupam Kher (playing
a straight-faced honest CBI officer), and Ashutosh Rana (very effective
as Om Puri's right hand man) Aseem, seem to be in it for fun.
Nothing that we see in "Dirty Politics" justifies the presence of these talented actors.
A
very poorly executed film which makes you feel sorry for the
body-politic of the nation. Surely things are not so bad in politics?
