The audience expectations were high. Theatre owners were anxious for a new product that could corner the audience fancy after ‘Dabangg 2’. Coming three weeks after the Salman Khan starrer’s release, ‘Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola’ was expected to save the blushes of the Multiplex community after the no-show of Kamal Hassan’s ‘Vishwaroopam’.
But that’s not going to happen because ‘Matru…’ is an insipid, crazy and crude attempt at weirdly compelling (Emir Kusturica) which comes unstuck in the first few frames itself. Inspiration is all very well but when you don’t have a worthy subject or weighty characters to plough your borrowed path then all you have is a damp squib.
Vishal Bharadwaj appears to have touched the nadir of his creativity, from ‘Kaminey’ to ‘Saat Khoon Maaf’ and now ‘Matru Ki…’ he has touched rock bottom in terms of subject, style, content, language, music , lyrics and performances.
The latest in his inconsistent oeuvre (which includes gems like ‘The Blue Umbrella’ and ‘Omkara’), ‘Matru Ki Bijlee ka Mandola’ has a folksy blend of African and Indian rhythms pulsing along side a narrative that goes haywire in it’s clueless attempt to manufacture comedy out of linguistic euphemisms associated with the mass versus class struggle.
The language central to this peasant offence is Haryanvi-a dialect that will in all likelihood be unfamiliar to most of India. After the first few words, the romance of a new lingua is also over because beyond a point it’s not clearly understandable even to those who understand Hindi. So the chances of this film striking a chord anywhere in India (other than Haryana) is zilch.
The film opens with two drunks in a white stretch limousine crashing through a desi liquor shop deep within the Haryanvi countryside. It’s a stupid attempt to sign in with a Tarantinoesque flurry and the foolishness is all too apparent. Why would a land baron, filthy rich owner of a Palatial Haveli with enough liquor in it’s coffers, have to resort to such atrocious grandstanding? Only Abhishek Chaubey and Vishal Bharadwaj can tell I guess.
Hukum Singh Matru (Imran Khan) is the driver cum lawyer from the peasantry while Harry Mandola is the richest landlord in Mandola village consisting of verdant farmland that Harry and his cohort – the Chief Minister Chaudhary Devi (Shabana Azmi) plans to grab in order to transform the rustic rural landscape to one of glass walled towers and retail plazas. It’s a given that the underhand income would touch the skies so-to-speak.
The set-up is weak and unedifying. There’s little logic to support any of the actions and the characters are drawn from fantasy rather than reality. In fact it’s clear from this film that Vishal Bharadwaj is totally clueless about Indian politics and Politicos. Why else would he show a Chief Minister consorting with a local Baron throughout the movies runtime? Not only does she seem to have time only to get this one project underway, she also appears to be spending a lot of time suggestively enamoured by Harry. There’s in fact not a single scene showing her at Work in her office of State. The ill-conceived sequence showing her in a boardroom has her passing just one file with her son and her small coterie in attendance. There is absolutely no logical build-up to the manufactured conflict or it’s subsequent resolution.
Harry is supposedly two-faced. He is a benevolent master given to largesse when drunk while sobriety lends him a cruel, Machiavelli that has the peasants up in arms. Matru who is the man in the know also doubles up as ‘Mao’ the leader of the peasants who springs an uprising to defeat his lord and benefactor’s plans for the farm lands. The travails of agriculture, forced urbanisation, land grabbing, compensation, loss of livelihood and sustainability certainly deserved a strong cinematic statement but Bharadwaj doesn’t have anything much to say in his quirky dramatisation. And therefore makes a mockery, trivialising an issue that has affected thousands of peasants in modern India.
‘Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola’ is Bhardwaj’s attempt at a political film tackling political corruption and capitalist greed. The political posturing thereof is just that and doesn’t achieve any high notes. The humour is non-existent for most of the time save for one or two surprising ticklers that fade away soon enough in a monster of uncertain quips.
Bhardwaj and Chaubey may have had certain ambitions while scripting this deadpan monster but it’s not very clear to the viewer. It’s an intended comedy that is so farcical and weird that it’s really not laughable. The characters, all quirky, are not rooted in the earth. Though they supposedly belong to Haryana they do not have any understanding of the mores or culture of the state.
Anushka Sharma (Bijlee – daughter of Harry Mandola), is ridiculous to say the least. She wears hot-pants and dunks herself in village pools just so that she can get to a ball, while the whole village hangs around salivating. Bijlee is no traditionalist and has a will of her own for most of the film until her father decides to marry her off to the dumb-bum Badal (Arya Babbar) the witless son of Chaudhary Devi. Then she is weepy, docile and actually waits for Matru to storm in at the nth moment and rescues her from a fate equal to death. Her romance with Matru also reeks of convenience because till half time she’s well on her way to hitching her choli to Badal’s suit.
Badal, on his way back from Africa, has ‘bought’ over a tribal dance group to perform just so that he can woo Bijlee with her heart’s desire. One would think that since this troupe was Badal’s preserve he would have use for them thereafter. But Bharadwaj Company employ the members as extras aiding the Matru-Bijlee romance and the fight of the peasantry. Even continuity is a sore point in this debacle. The symbolism of a pink cow visualised in sober stupor by Harry is also lost in the maze of beer and pink desi daru aka Gulabo , that litters the narrative with Freudian implications.
Gulzar’s lyrics are incredibly lurid, crude and suggestive, Bharadway’s music borrows generously from Eastern European and African shores, therefore sounding out-of-sync with the run of play. The dance choreography amounting to sexually suggestive thrusts and vampy gyrations, is also quite unfit for a general audience viewing. Chaubey and Bharadway quote liberally from Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ trying hard to instil a worth that is totally non-existent in the fake commie dramedy that is listless, purposeless, extremely tedious and expressively crude in experience. The performances are all iffy at best. Anushka saddled with an ill-written role, tries her best to sparkle and tease but all she appears to be doing is showing off her slim-line physique.
Pankaj Kapur appears to have underplayed Mandola to an extent where we just don’t get the hang of his characters’crucial traits. Imran Khan is a little too prosaic and dispassionate to swing the Matru-Mao peasant leader gambit. Arya Babbar is also saddled with a moth-eaten role of a half-wit and can make little of an impression. Shabana Azmi, though pivotal to the plot, has illogic and stupidity in the creation of her character, to overcome. She does manage to instil a spark here and there but the inevitable crash and burn at the end was to be expected.
Despite having produced the film himself with his erstwhile collaborator Sabrina Dhawan as script consultant, this is by far the worst effort from Vishal Bharadwaj. This murderous assault on our innate sensibilities cannot be easily forgiven.
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