This week a film called Issaq releases across the country, and it's
yet another Shakespeare adaptation: Romeo And Juliet, this
time, set in Benaras.
It is a preposterously bad film, a shoddy wannabe that -- despite taking scraps from the table of Shakespearewallah Bhardwaj -- lacks ambition, soul, clarity. In case you were wondering, that title is pronounced iss-suck. And the film takes that last syllable far, far too seriously. The first time I saw Prateik Babbar in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na I was significantly intrigued. The second time I saw him, this time as a leading man, I was impressed.
Without holding his Dum Maaro Dum squeakiness against him, I thought he'd be a solid choice to play that most overplayed of romantics. Also, I'd found many a merit in director Manish Tiwary's first film, Dil Dosti Etc. Guided by the bard's most universally evocative (and most frequently evoked) text, I thought something interesting might be on the cards.
It isn't. This is a monstrosity, a shoddily put-together collection of weakly written scenes that don't even attempt to flow from one scene to the other. The editors may be the chief culprits here, but the leading man must be chastised first.
Babbar is an enormous failure and an overblown embarrassment. His performance, lacking in both consistency and sincerity, is affected also by a simian gracelessness: his line-readings are atrocious, and every other dialogue is delivered in a different kind of pitch.
It is a preposterously bad film, a shoddy wannabe that -- despite taking scraps from the table of Shakespearewallah Bhardwaj -- lacks ambition, soul, clarity. In case you were wondering, that title is pronounced iss-suck. And the film takes that last syllable far, far too seriously. The first time I saw Prateik Babbar in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na I was significantly intrigued. The second time I saw him, this time as a leading man, I was impressed.
Without holding his Dum Maaro Dum squeakiness against him, I thought he'd be a solid choice to play that most overplayed of romantics. Also, I'd found many a merit in director Manish Tiwary's first film, Dil Dosti Etc. Guided by the bard's most universally evocative (and most frequently evoked) text, I thought something interesting might be on the cards.
It isn't. This is a monstrosity, a shoddily put-together collection of weakly written scenes that don't even attempt to flow from one scene to the other. The editors may be the chief culprits here, but the leading man must be chastised first.
Babbar is an enormous failure and an overblown embarrassment. His performance, lacking in both consistency and sincerity, is affected also by a simian gracelessness: his line-readings are atrocious, and every other dialogue is delivered in a different kind of pitch.
It is one of those cringeworthy producer's-son kind of performances, but I hear the Ramaiyya Vastavaiyya bloke was less painful. (I don't doubt it. What Babbar achieves here is a quite spectacular trainwreck; Tushhhar Kapoor and Jacckkie Bhagnani, however they spell their names, should hit theaters immediately for a good laugh.)
Perhaps in a misplaced tribute/slur, Tiwary names his battling families Kashyap and Mishra: it feels as if independent filmmaking buddies Anurag and Sudhir had a truly bloody falling out.
The two families are out and baying for each other's blood, but in the middle of their gangland strife is shoehorned a strange "Madrasi" Naxalite who gets his men to wear his face on masks and sculpt likenesses of him in the sand. It is all most exasperatingly harebrained and amateurish.
But then doesn't that particular play work even when performed by schoolboys in drag dangling over cardboard balconies? The whole point of that love-struck romeo and his street-side serenade is that you know all the inevitable, gristly facts but hey... whatcha gonna do about it?
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