Ishqiya: Vishal Bharadwaj Can Do No Wrong

Khalujaan (Naseeruddin Shah) and his nephew Babban (Arshad Warsi) are on the run from their boss, Mushtaq Bhai. Khalujaan - real name Iftekhar, but no one calls him that  - is Mushtaq Bhai's wife's rakhi bhai , but given that he and his bhanja stole a bagful of money from him and left him tied to a chair, things aren't exactly cordial between them. With nowhere else to run, they decide to hide out with Khalujaan's old friend Verma in Gorakhpur, except Verma is dead, and his widow Krishna (Vidya Balan) agrees to put them up. Hijinks - romantic and criminal - ensue.

Ishqiya isn't a traditional Bollywood movie; there are no song-and-dance numbers and it clocks in at a neat two hours. What really intrigued me about it was the fact that the plot and characters - especially Krishna - make sense, which makes them universal. With a bit of tweaking, these characters could be playing out this same plot in Australia or Scotland or wherever. If they do an American remake, by-the-by, my fantasy cast would include Sam Rockwell, Jeff Bridges and Toni Collette (yes, I know she's Australian, but she does a flawless American accent, so shush.)

The casting of this version is note-perfect. I wasn't sure about Vidya Balan at first, simply because she looks South Indian to me, but she has a steeliness about her that fits Krishna exactly. I do not believe there is another major actress working in Hindi films today who could have played broken-hearted, sly, smart Krishna as well as Vidya did - maybe Rani Mukherjee, but steely resolve has never been her forte, and I can't really see her playing as unglamorous a character as this, oil in her hair and all. And, wow, Arshad Warsi. To watch him in any of the dime-a-dozen comedies he does, you'd never think the man could act, but I'm very pleased to be proven wrong. In lesser hands, Babban would just be the lecherous comic relief character; Arshad Warsi gave him depth and enough warmth that Babban is as strong a character as his uncle Khalujaan, which brings us nicely to Naseeruddin Shah.

When writing about great actors, I am reminded of something Laurence Olivier once wrote about Anthony Hopkins auditioning for the role of Edmund* in King Lear - that he walked away with the part as neatly as a cat would with a piece of fish. We're so used to expecting that calibre of acting from Naseeruddin that even though he embodies henna-ed Khalujaan perfectly - a career criminal who once had aspirations towards the arts and falls in love with Krishna because of her music first - it simply doesn't have the same wow factor as the other two central performances. "It's Naseeruddin Shah! Of course he's good, what else would you expect? The man was the best thing about Krrish, for crying out loud."

Being set in the Hindi belt, the language they use in this movie is a bit different from what I'm used to, and weirdly, the movie wasn't subtitled, so a few of the lines went right over my head. What exactly is a "sulphate?" (And if you tell me, well, metals react with sulphuric acid to produce metallic sulphates, I will hit you. somehow.) But to be honest, it's refreshing to watch a Hindi film that for once, is not set in Bombay or the UK or Canada or Australia or the USA. If someone's only experience of India was through mainstream Hindi films, I very much doubt he or she would even suspect that rural India - apart from maybe Punjab - exists! It does, and in the boondocks of UP (where this film is set) and Bihar, kidnappings are rampant, guns are everywhere and life is desperate for the have-nots.

By Hindi film standards, Ishqiya is quite racy, because whoa, Arshad Warsi and Vidya Balan have chemistry. On the flipside, it is well-acted; the writing by Vishal Bharadwaj, Abhishek Chaubey and Sabrina Dhawan is sharp - plus there's a Chekov's gun!; and the direction by Abhishek Chaubey is quite good, and I don't mean, "for his first film," I mean good. So. When can we look forward to Ishqiya 2?

*It may have been Edgar, I'm not sure.