Subhash K Jha celebrates 22 years of Sujoy Ghosh’s Jhankar Beats in a new installment of This Day That Year.
As cool as Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai, with an added sizzle that won’t fizzle even when the film’s room -temperature gets so tepid, it smells like life’s ennui. That’s the best one-line description for debutant writer-director Sujoy Ghosh’s film about love, life, condoms and, yes fellatio.
But let’s not jump the gun. The fun begins at the beginning when we meet Rishi (Rahul Bose) and Deep (Sanjay Suri) , two regular 10-5 copywriters who dream of winning a music contest. In their dream lies a joke.
Ghosh shares his characters’ jokey karma with us. Deep is deeply in love with his second-time blissfully pregnant wife Shanti (Juhi) while the cynical Rishi is on the verge of a divorce with his sullen wife Nikki (Rinke Khanna), and….….and what else????!!! Ghosh ‘s zany look at the world’s wacky truth about cracks and doubts, builds its case- history on the flimsiest chuckles and smiles of suburban existence. At times the humour goes amok (for instance Rishi and Deep caught bending compromisingly by an office boy is strictly yucky-yucky) .
Most of the time, Ghosh knows where to draw the line. From the blueprint of metropolitan life he draws a deliciously aromatic takehome pizza with toppings that are more filling than the base.
With the help of his editor Suresh Pai and cinematographer Mazhar Kamran, the eager-eyed and fairly-idealistic (even when his narrative is in the throes of cynicism Ghosh remains miraculously unsullied by ugliness and negativity) the director deconstructs the secret codes of formulistic filmmaking and fills the frames with a delightful nonconformism
Ghosh doesn’t disrespect mainstream Hindi cinema’s Great Formulistic Tradition. In fact, one of this utterly endearing film’s great thrills is to spot the historical cinematic references from Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay and the music of R.D. Burman.
Ghosh meshes into his nimble narrative the jibes and cracks on life which weave smoothly in and out of his protagonists’ lives. The rapidfire narration is fascinatingly multi-lateral. Ghosh goes at his characters’ warts and moles with a granivorous giggle. But the humour (apart from the one about the nose-digging businessmen) is never cruel. Even when Rishi and Deep make fun of the mooney-eyed Romeo pal Neel (newcomer Shayan Munshi) who can’t gather the courage to propose to the sultry girl (Reema Sen) the tone never darkens into savage cruelty.
Some sequences stand out in the melee of fluent farce. In a film that avoids grim situations like the plague the moment when Deep plants a tight slap on the escapist Rishi’s face makes us flinch in shock and surprise. This moment more than any other, serves as a reminder of how seriously we must take a voice like Sujoy Ghosh in order to see entertainment-oriented Indian cinema arrive at its nirvanic checkpost.
Jhankar Beats is an urban fable with wings. It soars beyond any of the ‘Hinglish’ flicks about devil-may-care dudes and chicks which have emerged from the Great Bollywood Dream Factory. The end-result is sincerely funny and funnily sincere. The characters sing and dance to intangible and discernible tunes without seeming like anything but people whom we ‘ve me somewhere on the road of life Ghosh’s grasp over the grammar of music and songs is astonishing. The way he knits R.D.Burman’s soul into his narrative is evidence of the director’s urban intelligence. Take the sequence where the three friends try to pacify Deep’s wife with RD’s Meri soni meri tamanna or the masterstroke at the climax where an RD classic(Humein tumse pyar kitna) merges magically with Vishal-Shekhar’s original on-stage track—these are moments that define modern Indian cinema within all its tradition-bound complexities that now beg to erupt into a modern voice.
Sujoy Ghosh provides that voice. He ‘s a terrific storyteller, even though the story gets alarmingly thin in the second-half. The aimless banter of friends who are so comfortable with one another that they can get away with anything, the crisp crunch of a potato chip as it lodges itself in the mouth and the whoosh of air being let out of dozens of condoms blown into balloons(after Khwahish the condom seems to have joined the Hindi cinema’s repertoire of permissible props) ….such are sounds of routine music that fill the impressively designed soundtrack of Ghosh’s film.
Then there are the performance, so natural in their ironical intuitions they seem to jump out of the screen. Though there’s too much in him of Aamir Khan in Dil Chahta Hai Rahul Bose once again proves he’s a the king of slightly eccentric workingclass characters. Juhi Chawla as the nifty mother- hen , again reveals flashes of great comic talent. But it’s Sanjay Suri with his richly understated sense of fun and a presence that projects a shy serenity, who steals the show. Wonder what’s keeping Suri from getting the recognition he deserves.
What realy and truly makes Jhankar Beats a film to salute is its inconspicuous storytelling technique. Where Ghosh could’ve gone for wide-eyed wonder , he chooses a toned-down sense of smothered incredulity. Without scampering breathlessly he captures a simultaneity of time and place in the happy hurried frames, so that we see not just what the camera does, but also what it could be doing while we ‘re chuckling.
In a throwback conversation Jhankar Beats producer Pritish Nandy recalled the experience with pleasure pride. “In the age of heart stopping violence and action in cinema, it is wonderful to remember Jhankar Beats, an ode to friendship and great music. It surprised us all by doing so well. The multiplex era was just beginning and the film attracted an entirely new bunch of viewers who were sick and tired of the standard Bollywood fare.”
According to Mr Nandy, Jhankar Beats was a game-changer. “The film opened up an entirely new genre of cinematic content, a tradition we still continue in many ways. Four More Shots Please, our extremely successful Amazon Original series, is today exploring the same idea of friendship 21 years later, among another generation, this time four young girls, millennials. Jhankar Beats continues to be one of my favourite films from our repertoire. It is timeless. And so is its music.”
