Stumped Hindi Movie
Life's vicious vicissitudes can be converted into vibrant terms provided we look at the quirks and caprices of existence through the right glasses. That's precisely what debutant writer-director Gaurab Pandey has attempted to do in "Stumped". The film is a venturesome break for leading lady Raveena Tandon as a producer.
Having got herself into a film where she could comfortably be the focus of interest, Raveena chooses to be a part of a vast ensemble, lending her presence to a socially relevant concept rather than a self-promotional vehicle.
Indeed, the best aspect of Stumped is its fragmented narration that takes us into many lives in one apartment block (a la Freaky Chakra and Praan Jaye Par Shaan Na Jaye), capturing the simultaneity of people's lives in a jostling milieu.
Pandey's film juxtaposes the raging cricket fever that grips all Indians with their insensitivity towards the grief and anguish of those who are isolated from the collective frenzy of sportsmanship during world events like the World Cup.
The characters are extremely funny in their insulated ecstasy. There's a sequence where the cricket-stricken Anjan Shrivastava falls at neighbourhood guru Shrivallabh Vyas' feet, begging that India win its match against Sri Lanka. To a person standing outside the immediate circle of cricket, such frenzied passion for the game appears downright ludicrous.
Pandey satirizes his cricket-fixated characters without savaging their single-minded passion for the game. At many points, the narration lapses into casual conversational introspection on the quality of our lives. A character says Indians are obsessed with five things including cricket movies and sex. "Sex because they can't do it properly," he adds with a chuckle.
Well at least we can make movies properly!
The humour often gets dangerously raunchy in the endeavour to capture working class rhythms. The interaction between the pubescent boys of the block borders on the bawdy, but Pandey pulls out in time. The relationship of tender eroticism that grows between the teenager (Amin Gazi) and the soldier's wife Reena (Raveena) had the potential to grow into a central concern in the plot. Though Pandey handles the adolescent's crush on the lonely wife with delicate humour, he prefers to concentrates on a macro cosmic view of the symbiotic and often-incestuous relationship between cricket and war.
The sequences showing Reena's suffering after her soldier husband (Aly Khan) is missing in action are juxtaposed with her neighbours' obsession with cricket, some of it quite amusing: There's a Sikh man who keeps television (and cricket) out of his home while his wife (Asha Sachdev) and son sneak a dekko in the bathroom on a portable set they hide behind the commode. Such moments, though episodic in a tele visual way, are funny and thought provoking. Director Pandey is definitely more comfortable as a writer than a raconteur. Frequently the film flounders in search of a visual tenor.
Continuity also suffers as irrelevant situations impinge on the basic tussle between sport and a social conscience. An item song by Salman Khan doesn't seem to add any weight to the satire. Also, the effort to film war scenes seems a bit unproductive. But the indifference and sensitivity of the nation is well mapped in Raveena's pain-lashed face as she sits like a numbed painting while a callous television crew asks her obvious crude and unthinking questions like, "Now that your husband is reported missing, how do you feel?"
The mixture of pain and nostalgia in Raveena's scenes is ambrosial. The way her neighbours shun her after the tragedy in her life shows the director understands human nature only too well. Regrettably, Pandey's sensitivities as a writer don't get across as effectually as one would've expected in a film that has everything going for it, including some skilled performances by character actors like Anjan Shrivastava, Shrivallabh Vyas and Raveena Tandon.
