122

Within the Urdu-dubbed Egyptian gore-thriller 122 beat the hearts of two romantics. The film’s lead pair Umnia (Amina Khalil) and Nasr (Ahmed Dawood) are in love; so much so that they’ve secretly married — a fact unknown to the girl’s family.

Worse yet, she’s pregnant — another secret they’ve kept to themselves. The two are desperately trying to save enough so that they can officially marry in front of their families; however, like in every corner of the world, marriages are expensive.

Nasr, whose past was from the wrong end of the tracks, convinces Umnia to make a drug run from one city to the next. In half-a-day he hopes to make enough to take care of everything. She, with their nikahnama (marriage contract) in hand, forces herself into the journey. On their way to the other city, their car is rammed by a speeding vehicle.

Umnia, who already had a hearing disability, ends up in a secluded, half-constructed hospital with the rest of the passengers from the two vehicles. Nasr, however, is missing from the crash site; his body lies chained to a morgue lit by red and blue lights. On a table next to Nasr’s, a masked doctor is plundering a man’s body for the black market.

In these first 30 minutes, 122 (which we later learn, is the police hotline number in Egypt) almost perfects the emotional grounds of the story. The rest of the film is a routine thriller featuring a remorseless doctor with his own family troubles (Tarek Lotfy) and a minimal hospital staff whose main function is to die gruesome deaths at the hands of a mad man.

Director Yasir Al-Yasiri capably handles the minimalism of the story. The screenplay is linear, moving from one story point to the next without much intrigue or intelligence — especially when dead bodies pile up. The superglue holding the audiences interests, though, is the love story of two desperate youngsters who are literally trapped in the worst day of their lives.

Dawood and Amina are sincere, engaging actors, whose characters’ backstories and physical handicaps hardly come into play during the film. It’s a minor grievance really, given the film’s swift pace.

A look at the films currently in the cinemas

Fraud Saiyaan

In Fraud Saiyaan we see Arshad Warsi as Bhola, a conman who hoodwinks innocent women into marrying him so that he can run off with their personal belongings.

The women he cons — 12 in all — are scattered all over Uttar Pradesh, India. Unlike other conmen who simply steal and runaway, he still returns to his wives, whom he sweet talks into handing over some more of their savings.

After a fair bit of horseplay, the uncle (Saurabh Shukla) of one of his wives gets wise to his con, and the two go wild on a cross-district romp where Bhola adds more wives to his list. The last of the batch include a gangster’s sister and the innocent-looking wife of a passenger he met on a train, played by Pakistani model/actress Sara Loren.

Warsi and Shukla slide into the role with relative ease, and the actresses —including Loren — are fine as well. Despite the talent, the screenplay becomes trite half-way, indulging in a series of shenanigans that do not lend any emotional weight to the characters.

Bhola is dead simple to understand, but his reasons for being what he is, are superficial at best. This image doesn’t gel with Warsi’s earnest performance, and the realistic tone of the world he inhabits (Fraud Saiyaan, with its rustic and urban production design and cinematography, feels like a long-lost brother of Ishqiya and its sequel).

The women Bhola marries simply accept that they’ve been conned, and disappear after the intermission break and one wonders if the director or the screenwriter even thought of resolving any of the lingering subplots (at least four wives have prominent story arcs). After a while one gets fed up because the sanctity of marriage appears to be a plaything for the filmmakers.

By the climax, Bhola, who has finally found true love (yeah, right!), escapes from an angry mob who are trying to catch a runaway groom; his face giddy, without any remorse or worry of repercussions. It’s an immature way of dealing with life, for both Bhola and the filmmakers.

The Accidental Prime Minister

The bombastic and urgent title sequence opening The Accidental Prime Minister is a contradiction to the man whose story it represents: Manmohan Singh — India’s squeaky-voiced former Prime Minister whose ascension to the seat was considered a political power-play.

Like Singh, the film is neither exigent nor grandiloquent — but that doesn’t mean its execution is dull. Adapted from Sanjaya Baru’s book of the same name, The Accidental Prime Minister sees Singh from Baru’s perspective, who was for a time his chief media advisor and (if we believe the film) his prime strategist against Sonya and Rahul Gandhi (Suzanne Bernert, Arjun Mathur) — the First Family of India, who had allegedly installed Singh as a puppet Prime Minister.

Contrary to the screenplay, Baru considers Singh to be a genius and the screenplay quickly moves through pivotal highlights of his tenure as India’s PM. We, of course, don’t buy Singh’s genius one bit.

Anupam Kher’s caricature of Singh is partly to blame for the disconnect. Kher, a fine actor once-upon-a-time, lampoons Singh’s un-authoritarian voice and body language to laughable extents. Singh’s wrists seem to be disconnected from his shoulders, his walk, deliberate and conscious at the same time; whenever Singh looks at someone, his mind appears to be blank, as if he’s wondering where he is, or even why he’s here.

On the other hand, Akshay Khanna plays Baru with suave, devilish, swagger. A former journalist and editor, Baru often breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience, as if confiding his point of view with us, his fellow outsiders.

More importantly, unlike Singh, he seems to having fun, as he flicks off both petty politics and big party decisions with equal irreverence — purportedly, for Singh’s sake.

Debuting director Vijay Ratnakar Gutte is keen to tell a linear story of politics and betrayal without unnecessary drama. Almost all of the action takes place during dialogues in lush government offices.

Although not as axiomatic or kinetic as Aaron Sorkin’s works (The West Wing, The Newsroom, A Few Good Men), The Accidental Prime Minister is a swell, if one-sided story of a Prime Minister who was apparently simply in office for convenience’s sake.

Why Cheat India

In Why Cheat India (the ‘Why’ was added later because of pressure from the Indian Censor Board), Emraan Hashmi plays an examination fixer who considers himself a Robin Hood of sorts. His character, Rakesh, finds promising young people who aced government university placement exams and pays them handsomely to stand-in for unintelligent students who can pay through the nose. It’s an interesting con and the premise, though faint, is expertly plotted through the narrative by screenwriter-director Soumik Sen.

Hashmi, who takes up the emotional burden of the entire story, appears 15 minutes into the film, commandeering events from that moment onwards. By intermission time, and especially the climax, we firmly believe that his character is a necessary evil in a society that values certificates over education.

Hashmi has become an intelligent actor who knows the limits of his acting ability. The script is cognizant of his and his character’s limits, yet perceptive enough to shift focus on supporting characters before scenes begin to drag.

Though set in Uttar Pradesh, Why Cheat India’s theme is universal (similar to 3 Idiots and Hindi Medium). Notwithstanding the convenient story turns near the climax, it is hard to dismiss the film’s astuteness on the issue — and harder still to dismiss the sheer fun one has watching Hashmi’s character caper through the education system with nary a scratch.

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 27th, 2019