First Take | When life serves you lemons

At 80, Christopher Plummer played a 75-year old man who comes out as gay in Beginners. It is gladdening to know Sooraj Barjatya’s latest Uunchai stars a slew of senior actors: Amitabh Bachchan, Boman Irani, Anupam Kher, Neena Gupta, Sarika, Danny Denzongpa, and Nafisa Ali. Most of the time, Hindi cinema doesn't know what to do with its 60-plus actors unless it’s Amitabh Bachchan, the only Bollywood veteran for whom roles are still written.

Mr Bachchan’s now all set to play the lead in director Amit (Badhai Ho) Sharma’s Indian adaptation of The Intern where he steps into Robert de Niro’s formidable shoes to share a very unusual relationship with a young 35-something actress.

These are exceptions rather than the rule in Hindi cinema. I am yet to see a Bollywood script as smart and savvy as The Valet which gives the 60-year old Mexican actor Eugenio González Derbez a role of a lifetime as a car parking valet Antonio whose life changes when he comes in the way of a lovers’ tiff between a famous film star Olivia (the stunning Samara Weaving) and her married lover in public view.

In order to save his skin from his domineering wife’s vigilant yes the lover, a certifiable psycho of a liar tells his wife that the woman in the picture taken by the paparazzi is actually in an affair with the other man in the picture, the valet who was innocently standing around. It’s a deliciously seductive and enticingly naughty premise borrowed from a French film.

Director Richard Wong takes a potentially pulpy idea to semi-sublime summits, thanks to the main lead who makes the Mexican valet an upright, honest-to-goodness 60-year old Mama’s Boy who wants to make the unhappy superstar actress, caught in a trashy extra-marital relationship, as happy as possible.

Eugenio Derbez, last seen in the Oscar-winning Coda where he played music teacher, hits all the right notes with his sexy young co-star. His feelings toward her are asexual, but not free of sexual tension. He brings Olivia home to his nosy mom, sleeps on the same bed as she. But they spend the night talking and pretend to be having sex for the voyeuristic satisfaction of two private detectives played by Ravi Patel and John Pirruccello who are spying from the building on the opposite side of the street.

In Antonio’s bustling Mexican home Olivia finds a familial warmth she had never experienced before. In the film, we get ethnic-eccentric characters, like Antonio’s mother (Carmen Salinas) who has an affair with her landlord and insists on sharing intimate details with her mortified son. There are shades of Notting Hill here. What if Hugh Grant’s character were older and not a fan but a well-wisher of the lonely superstar? What if 60-plus actors acted their own age without losing their sense of fun and their mojo? It rarely happens in the movies.

What happens to accomplished acknowledged maestros of movie-making when they are asked to make a film for the OTT platform? They seem to lose the plot, that’s what! Is it the size of the screen that inhibits them? Compare what Anurag Kashyap did in Gangs Of Wasseypur with his utterly ridiculous AK Versus AK where ‘AK’ Anurag Kashyap made hell of ‘AK’ Anil Kapoor’s life, and together they made hell of our lives for two hours.

Jeethu Joseph’s 12th Man in Malayalam is a worse torture than AK Versus AK. This is Mohanlal Versus Mohanlal, versus our patience. I don’t mean to say Mohanlal has a double role. But he has two different personalities, one in the prelude where he plays an annoying intrusive bore who keeps barging into the fun zone of a bunch of vacationers at a resort where the film was shot(at a pandemic discount rate, I am sure).

Then after a murder happens, Mohanlal suddenly changes, quite like P.K . Suresh who goes from alert sleuth to drunken sloth in no time at all. Mohanlal is now a wry cynical sourpuss investigative officer grilling the vacationers with questions that are thrown with great seriousness. But there is no catch. It’s all talk-talk-talk with no impressive payoff.

In the absence of a coherent plot 12th Man feels like a ruka (frozen) version of Basu Chatterjee’s Ek Ruka Hua Faisla which in turn was inspired by Agatha Christie’s 10 Little Indians. Or maybe ‘inspired’ is not the word we are looking for here, considering how scattered and strewn the plot appears.

There are eleven characters all of whom know one another for years, through college and probably through school too. Not one among five couples look like couples, probably because the actors had no time to rehearse. Or even if they did rehearse, they didn’t get the point. I don’t blame them. Neither did I. This has got to be the most implausible whodunit in the history of the suspense genre. Even now, long after I (happily) left behind this film I am still wondering why the murder was committed.

A bigger question: why was this film made? Director Jeetu Joseph and Mohanlal have earlier collaborated over the landmark game-changing suspense drama Drishyam and its overrated but nonetheless vital sequel. 12th Man was made specially for the digital platform. We need an investigative officer far smarter than the one played by Mohanlal to figure out why this dunderheaded who-cares-who-dunnit was made.

A large part of the intended suspense hinges on the characters surrendering their cellphones to a common pool, with everyone given the permission to listen in when there is a call. Ah, so Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Game. This is someone’s idea of a novel ingenious idea. But sorry, it doesn’t work.

12th Man proves two things: one, the OTT platform is not being taken seriously enough by filmmakers in India and two, even the God Of Acting Mohanlal makes mistakes. This one is more than a mistake. It is a cringe-worthy blunder.

R K Suresh’s Mayan in Visithiran, the official Tamil remake of the 2018 Malayalam film Joseph is not your conventional hero. He is a doomed soul from the word. He drinks himself silly all day long, doesn’t even change his clothes when duty beckons. Oh, didn’t I tell you Mayan is a cop. All his colleagues and juniors despise him for what he has done to himself. But this trainwreck of a man doesn’t care. This is the most washed-out portrayal of a washout I’ve ever seen. As played by Suresh, Mayan is a lost cause. His friends regularly express their disgust at what he has done to his life.

“First it was drinks. Now it’s ganja also,” one of Mayan’s colleagues can’t keep the contempt out of his voice. Mayan couldn’t care less. He says he needs boosters to fortify his spirit before he enters his home in the night. The ghosts of his past haunt Mayan incessantly. He has gotten habituated to them. His life is a litany of losses and death comes as a release.

To make a film on the life of such a loser is not easy. To make the man look dignified even in his worst moments requires tremendous directorial skills.

I am afraid director M Padmakumar is not quite the Bimal Roy of South Indian cinema. And Mayan is no Devdas. Yes, he drinks himself to death. And yes, there are two women in his life, and the memory of one destroys his marriage to another. But for all practical purposes, Visithiran is a film that trips over its own tragic destiny. It starts off as a murder mystery. Then fifteen minutes later, the case is solved, and the narrative transforms into a domestic drama where a successful marriage is ripped apart by the ghosts of a past relationship. And then it miraculously transforms into a crime thriller, a medical scam.

Somehow Visithiran survives all these transitions, but barely. What is interesting is the concept of screen heroism that is no longer what it once was. A man with nothing to lose, because he has lots of everything, is just as heroic as a hero on a horse fighting bloody battles with faceless enemies.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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