Your take on the current state of the Indian Modeling industry?

The Indian fashion industry is growing by bounds and leaps. With Indian designers like Manish Malhotra and Rajesh Pratap getting international acclaim the world is eying the Indian fashion industry at the moment. With FDCI organizing world class fashion weeks in Delhi, Designers, Buyers and overall the entire industry benefits from it.

 Modeling in India vs doing campaigns out of India, your preference?

Every country has different work ethics. India in that sense has a very rich culture which reflects in its work.
I prefer to be in India as compared to be out. Its just the love for the place which makes me feel so.
I love working in Mumbai. The work culture there is very smooth and professional. Everyone knows their job and respects time.
But at the same time working abroad is another story all together. Its the technical team which makes all the difference. We still have a lot to learn from them.

Aspirations to face the camera, in television or films?

I do not have any aspirations for movies at all. Fashion work is very different from acting and I prefer to stick to what I do best, which is walking the ramp.
Television is something which I enjoy once in a while. I do some fitness or fashion shows once in a while.

song Aami Shotti Bolchi from the movie Kahaani

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London Paris New York is a film that captures the angst of the twenties, the most dramatic period of one’s life – when you have to find a career; you have your first significant relationship and most importantly form your identity in this world.

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What got you into acting, in the first place?

As a kid growing up in Delhi I always wanted to be in the movies. I used to hear stories of kids running away from homes and landing up in Bombay but I never thought of doing it as I knew it would hurt my parents badly.  I decided to first join theatre and then do films. That took me to one of the most prestigious acting schools in India-the National School of Drama (“NSD”) in New Delhi. After graduating from there I worked in theatre for a bit and then assisted Ketan Mehta and worked with Naseeruddin Shah very closely on two films. During that time I got fascinated with cinema and wanted to study it. My quest took me to Europe for a while and then I shifted to Toronto where I have been living since over a decade and a half. I think I became sort of disillusioned with acting and Bollywood of late 80’s and wanted to do something different. In Toronto I tried different hats and finally became an editor after having attended another very popular Norman Jewison film school, Canadian Film Centre. But during all that time acting stayed in my mind and I always thought may be one day I will go back to it. And I AM back now.
All this happened because of a chance meeting with one of the most amazing acting teachers I have come across, Jacqueline McClintock from Montreal who teaches Meisner. It changed my life. I studied with her for a bit and decided to pack my bags and head to Bollywood.

On the influence of NSD, in your development as an actor?   

NSD influenced me greatly. I am not sure that it made me an actor but it surely put me on the right path. That is where I came in touch with some of the most important filmmakers and actors of our times like Shyam Benegal, Ketan Mehta, Prakash Jha, Naseerudding Shah, Om Puri, B.V. Karanth, Barry John to name a few. After NSD I didn’t even think of doing anything else but to stay in theatre and cinema. It had a very deep impact on me.

You appear to be the man with the golden touch, whichever project you touch, however different, appears to have a successful run at the box office, from TZP, Jannat, Saheb Biwi. On your experience in working with these three distinct filmmakers?

Yes all three of them are very different films. Taare was a windfall. I had no idea that it was going to happen when I first arrived in India. I remember my first day on the shoot. There were these huge lights and I was standing with Aamir and Amole who was then directing the film. It felt surreal. By the time I did Jannat it was still a bit strange. I had refused it but I am glad I did it. I remember soon after Jannat released I was driving in Bombay and stopped at a cross light. A group of street kids who cell umbrellas, books and many other things on these junctions came running towards me. I first thought they wanted to cell me their merchandise but soon they told me that they had loved my Hamam soap dialog in it. I was quite amazed by how much Bollywood movies have actually become part of the life in India. I mean these kids are not educated and are poor but they see every film. By Saheb I was quite comfortable. This is again a role which I loved playing. I completely felt at ease. This is and of course Yeh Saali ZIndagi as well.

4.Talk a little about your upcoming projects?

I am mostly working with Indie filmmakers in Bollywood now and that is where I am finding my like-mindedness. I don’t hate mainstream cinema but it very rarely offers films that are greatly entertaining and enlightening at the same time. Just aiming to entertain through an art form is shallow and doesn’t contribute much to any society. In a country like India where there are so many issues that need to be looked into there is a great need of cinema which reflects that. I am attempting to be part of this New Age Cinema that is fast emerging here. I am also slowly going back to performing on stage and soon will be directing my first film as well.

On your days in Canada and the creative scene over there?

Toronto is a fantastic city. I miss it. When I first arrived in India I used to go on the net and read the Canadian news papers but I had to stop it because I started to get very emotional and nostalgic. Whatever I am today it is because of Canada, Toronto has taught me a lot. I owe a lot to my city. I wish I could go back quite often and return some of it to the city I love the most in the world. It is my home now and I am away from home. May be soon I will start making films in both the cities Toronto and Bombay.

Heist films are generally quickies, focused and to-the-point. Contraband keeps to its brief and serves up a delightfully tight, somewhat manipulative, a little complicated but intelligent crime caper that stays to the point.

It begins similarly as well. Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is an ex-smuggler who now works installing security alarms. He has a lovely wife Kate (Kate Beckinsale), two kids and a happy home. All of this comes under danger when Kate’s brother Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) drops a cocaine cargo he was running on a ship for fear of being caught. Now his boss Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi) is baying for his blood, demanding the cargo’s worth of money while threatening to harm Kate and her children. Chris is forced to work out a short-cut to getting instant millions and he does but not before putting his wife and children in his friend, Sebastian’s (Ben Foster) guardianship. What follows not only involves fake notes, armoured car heists, drug-running on cargo ships but betrayal and murder.

The director, Baltasar Kormákur remakes the film from an Icelandic film titled ‘Reykjavík-Rotterdam’ (2008) starring himself. It is a race-to-the-finish sort of film that leaves little time to absorb any details more than necessary for the plot to move on. In a tightly narrated fashion it lays out the plan, the progression and growing stakes in equal measure and creates a fair amount of tension while doing it. The odds stalked against Chris are huge yet he, the eponymous, templat-ish, fearless heist-hero will pull through anything however bizarre for that stoic and unassailable love for his family. He is the all-protector of his vulnerable wife, children and here, brother-in-law too. There is little we get to know about him apart from this unnatural heroism except that he loves pulling off such jobs. That, again does little for the plot.

What does is the sharp cutting and edgy narrative, just about balancing the showing and telling of the plan and unfolding of the next development, keeping us summarily hooked to what happens next. For a crime thriller this is enough runs gained for winning the match. Obviously then, the film becomes a plot-based caper where characters do little than serve up the next thrill or curve and Wahlberg and Beckinsale play their roles strictly within these limits. The grainy, grungy visuals chalk up a gritty landscape that helps the film do what it sets out to do with determination – to keep having you ask, so what’s next?!

Does that make it good film? Well, it makes it a good well-spent two hours following the twisted terrains of crime at the movies.

After last year’s contemplative and analytic Contagion Steven Soderbergh comes back with a vigorous spy thriller. In a neat and tight little plot he makes his lady protagonist Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) combat, shoot, run, jump and defeat the most intrepid of opponents.

A covert operations spy, Mallory gets into a trap laid to betray her and turns the story on her opponents’ head by becoming their nemesis. Working for a private organization she is hired by a government agent Coblez (Michael Douglas) and his contact Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas) to rescue a man captured in Barcelona. Little does Mallory know, as she embarks upon the trail that she is being set-up and her own ex-boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) is part of the plan. She soon gets wiser and in one swoop turns hunted from the hunter. But Mallory wants her revenge and she will have it. She begins her hunt for every person responsible for betraying her.

In a frenzy of building-scaling acrobatics and dynamic hand-to-hand combat Soderbergh tells a tale of action and fury that has little story. But he masks this with the aces of sharp twists and turns he throws at his audience without warning. He has his petite lady protagonist do the toughest acts and she pulls them off with a rare confidence, shining of smart manouveres and totally lacking in false bravado. Perhaps, after Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Gina Carano fits well into the fantasy of the invincible, fearless Superwoman.

It is a sparse tale that unfolds in front of us, largely keeping to Mallory’s chase. She is the focus of the film and remains its only take-away. In a film that veers corners faster than F1, the remaining stellar cast become mere plot points with little to do but merely provide her the motive to zip-zam-zoom us into well-deserved awe. Gina Carano, on her part plays the death-defying spy with a steely confidence and a slight brazen-ness that becomes her young spy. It makes us root for her when she dressed in a little black dress takes on a man in hand to hand combat and fights a bone-cracking, muscle-numbing fight to the finish. And wins.

Soderbergh also handles the camera and gives us visuals as sparse as is the terrain of the film. He keeps colours muted and captures action as vigorously as it explodes between the people, never letting the camera get in the way.

As an action thriller the film works like a little charm. Especially the tongue-in-cheek climax Soderbergh leaves us to figure out. And the manner in which he treats his heroine it is but a befitting end, because by now we know what she is capable of and leave the film chuckling at the smart under-telling. Delectable.

In a small village off the Western coast of India a young teacher and his family live an upright and simple life. Until it is mercilessly uprooted by an evil drug-lord Kancha Cheena. The teacher is defamed and hanged publicly and the family is made to flee their village. Behind them, over time, the village becomes Kancha’s kingdom of hell and a festering wound within Vijay, the teacher’s young son. A wound that is poisonous enough to infect Vijay’s entire life with a singular motive, revenge.

Karan Johar reprises his father Yash Johar’s best work (Agneepath 1990) with Hrithik Roshan, Sanjay Dutt and Priyanka Chopra in the leads. It is a film that borrows the framework of the original story and presents it with its own suitable tweaks. The grey Mandwa and middle-class milieu are the same but the sensibility is different. Within this new sensibility the film becomes a melodramatic and over-wrought piece that leaves no stone unturned in telling and literalising every emotion, action and motive.

Right from the start, the film takes a relaxed pace of unravelling the story. Hence, Kancha and Vijay’s childhood’s track, his joining hands with Rauf Lala (Rishi Kapoor), the local ganglord and his romantic track plodge haltingly towards what the film is really about – Vijay’s revenge and emotional release. This meandering story-telling points to a masala sensibility that is compelled to include every other element of cinema at the cost of its story. Despite Hrithik’s immense frowning and suitable huffing-puffing this dilutes the intensity of Vijay’s story.

For a film doused in tears, ash, blood it is an extremely loud and melodramatic affair that we watch unfolding. Hrithik keeps the explosive angst of Vijay seething beneath the surface and brings alive the pain of his traumatic past by his mere demeanour. However, the film has him lose subtlety to over-expression and he gives into the temptation of blustering the anger that has long become stony-edged. This, in combination with Sanjay Dutt’s surreally evil Kancha who spouts spiritual theisms without a care for diction or variation in articulation makes for a mis-matched war leaving us confused on whose side we are on. Piyush Mishra’s dialogues swings furiously from the terribly pedestrian to the most mis-fit philosophy.

In the war between Vijay and Kancha all else seem but of tertiary importance. Yet, a self-possessed but badly performed Rauf Lala takes up a lot of screen time. And so do a uselessly chirpy Priyanka Chopra and her colony of compulsively colourfully dressed up women. She fills her space with decent value but matters little in the larger scheme of things. Zarina Wahab’s weepy mother constantly fluctuates between two emotions never letting us get close to the taut complexity of her and Vijay’s relationship. Om Puri, in his upright and determined police officer role is simply a miscast and does not command the power his role is meant to.

A very tepid musical score and lyrics mark the entire narrative. An over-wrought back ground score underlines every emotion and turning point as though the dialogues weren’t (over) doing it enough. Besides being loud the film is also naïve while showing the interactions between the police and Home Ministry. A distinct lack of touch with rawness, angst and compelling evil in the directorial vision lends this film to become an insistently bloody saga of little impact than the one on the eardrums.

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When the film opens we see a tattooed hand sharpening a somewhat historic-looking knife. Soon, this visual gives way to footage of modern-day warfare and bloodshed. We know then, that Shakespeare’s tragic saga of the Roman leader Coriolanus is to be viewed in the 21st century setting.

Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes), the protagonist is at war and fights his arch-enemy Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler) in a valiant hand-to-hand combat. In minutes we know this is a ferocious General with an unbridled temperament. But it is when he gets back home that the real drama begins. His superiors and his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) persuade him to take up political office as a mark of recognition for his military accolades. He wins the support of the Roman Senate but a mutiny stirred up by Brutus and Sicinius turns the public against him. Egged by his passionate, irreverent and volatile disposition Coriolanus completely alienates them attracting an exile for himself. He leaves Rome in anger and joins forces with Aufidius to besiege Rome for revenge. Like a true Shakespearean tragic hero, he begins paving way for his own fall.

The film remains completely loyal to Shakespeare’s plot which in turn is based on historic turn of events. In adapting it to contemporary times Ralph Fiennes plays with setting but retains the dialogue and politics of yore. He also retains Shakespeare’s original vision of his characters and redraws them with a sparkling honesty. He shows Coriolanus for the impulsive and explosive valiant leader he is and Ralph Fiennes plays it with vigour and passion. However, he plays it uni-dimensional, unable to go deeper into the skin of the tragic hero and bring into play the various shades of good and bad that mark all of Shakespeare’s tragedy kings. Fiennes captures the mother-son relationship of Volumnia and Coriolanus with the same insight as Shakespeare, defining with discernment the almost possessive sense of ownership she displays, also alienating and disconcerting Coriolanus’ wife. Vanessa Redgrave owns the matriarch with a towering presence and conviction dwarfing Fiennes’ Coriolanus both by her stature and strength of character. But then that is exactly the sub-text of their relationship. Jessica Chastain as the fragile wife makes the perfect foil for the over-bearing mother and aggressive son with her intuitive performance.

Among the secondary characters Gerard Butler and Brian Cox put in dependable performances but it is Paul Jesson as Brutus and James Nesbitt as Sicinius who draw eyeballs by bringing out the vile corruption and squirming under-handed evil with ease.

The entire cast transforms the bombastic Shakespearean verse and prose into dramatic conversation. It is the ‘feeling’ more than usual eloquence with which his lines are generally enacted that contributes to the drama coming alive. However, it makes the film inaccessible but powerful nonetheless.

FATEMA KAGALWALA

As sages, legends and wisdom have always said love is random to find and easy to lose. Yet the more number of times we lose it the less capable we remain to nourish it. Goodnight Good Morning, in its own gentle manner, soul-bares two fragile people, Turiya (Manu Narayan) and Moira (Seema Rehmani) who accidentally meet in a bar and then spend an entire night on phone talking. This chat, innocuous flirting at first, leads them through the eight stages of relationships – The Icebreaker. The Honeymoon. The Reality Check. The Break-up. The Patch-up. The Confiding. The Great Friendship & The Killing Confusion.

Experimental in approach, the film is black and white and presented as a split-screen conversation between the two. All along jazz music plays in the background never letting us forget the film is about love, the finding, losing, keeping, gaining and searching of it.

The film is cosy even though a tad claustrophobic. It is assured of its characters and peels them layer by layer through the conversation they have. It’s with a piquant observation of urban, contemporary ideas and experiences of love in men and women that the film explores its characters. There may be little insight about relationships but the tightness of characterisation help us go along Turiya and Moira’s journey effortlessly. It however, leaves a gap in exploring the said stages with depth making the explanation of the same seem forced.There is also the spoofs in between that become inconsistent with the mood of the entire film, not helping it go anywhere. Similarly, the gang of friends become a less-than-useful baggage as well.

Although it is a singularly dialogue-oriented film, it cries out to be more visually imaginative. It pulls us into engaging with the smart-n-sexy Moira and soft-n-sugary Turiya from the start. They are opposites and they attract. There is sharp and easy camaraderie in their ice-breaker phase that effortlessly leads into us eagerly asking the ever-important question – what next? Their conversation is verbose and unfortunately limited by a visual style that makes the viewing auditory than the actual sensual experience to is. The singular split-screen with only close-ups and mid-shots, especially profiles to help do not let us explore the characters in our minds visually, which the narrative badly makes us want to do.

The film rallies on, on the steam of some sharp writing and absorbing performances of the lead pair. Manu Narayan’s guy-next-door Turiya, the consummate believer in true and everlasting love makes a solid contrast for the exquisite Seema Rehmani as Moira.Together, the pair pull the somewhat difficult film off-the-ground into a satisfying experience. It may not be brilliant but if you have known love closely, the film has the power to make you love or hate love, depending on your experience with it.

FATEMA KAGALWALA