Beeba Boys: Deepa Mehta Goes Gangster

Jeet Johar combines the worst of the old traditional ways and jaded modern sensibilities. He still lives with his parents, but he is not shy about unambiguously calling out his rivals in television interviews. Most women would avoid long-term entanglements with him, but Canadian Katya Drobot was never accused of being a deep thinker. Regardless, she will be the least of his problems in Deepa Mehta’s Beeba Boys (trailer here), which releases today on DVD in Canada.

The Beeba Boys are good like fellas and pretty like that Boy Floyd. They are Vancouver’s nattiest South Asian gang and their leader Johar has become a role model to innumerable bullied Sikh youngsters. He has plenty of enemies, but old school “local businessman” Robbie Greywal is the most dangerous.

Unbeknownst to Johar, Greywal has placed a traitor in his midst. However, as Nep befriends his fellow Beeba Boys as well as Johar’s grade school son, he starts to have ninth and tenth thoughts about his loyalties. Fortunately, Greywal had the foresight to let his attractive daughter Choti handle their undercover mole. It is pretty clear Nep is interested in her. He and “Manny the Joker” also befriend Johar lonely new wife, Drobot, but that is a pretty platonic relationship. Emotionally, Drobot might be in a state of arrested development, but she is not suicidal. Of course, there is no need for anyone in Johar’s orbit to kill themselves. There will be plenty of gangsters and hitman out to do the job for them.

Who knew Deepa Mehta had such a slickly violent gangster beatdown in her? Granted, none of the elements here are jaw-droppingly new, aside from its Sikh cultural identity, but she marshals them with the spiffy style of a Michael Mann film. Even if the broad strokes of their carouse-and-fall story are familiar, she puts everyone through their paces and makes sure they always look good.

Without question, Mehta’s ace card is Indian movie star Randeep Hooda, whom you might recall from Sunny Leone’s Bollywood debut (hmm, what was that called again?). As Johar, he snarls quite charismatically. His Cheshire Cat smile and so-deep-it-is-almost-demonic voice are enormously gangster-cinema-friendly. Frankly, a good two-thirds of the Beeba Boys are basically incredibly well-dressed extras, but jewelry designer and Wes Anderson repertory player Waris Ahluwalia makes the most of his Tarantino-esque dialogue as Manny.

Probably the most important thing about Beeba Boys is that everyone really looks fab. That is not a bad thing—shallow perhaps, but still a lot of fun. Recommended for fans of gangsters movies and Bollywood crime dramas (sorry, no musical numbers here), Beeba Boys releases today (1/12) on Canadian DVD, and surely some sort of American distribution will soon follow.

Midnight’s Children: Rushdie’s Novel Finally Comes to Big Screens

Today, any garden variety financial advisor will happily pitch you a BRIC fund.  However, the Indian economy was not always a magnet for foreign capital.  In fact, the years following independence were decidedly rocky.  Salman Rushdie’s 1981 Booker Prize winner served as both an indictment of the corruption and human rights abuses India had endured and a challenge to the nation to do better.  Despite the best efforts of Iran, Rushdie’s novel finally comes to the big screen, adapted and narrated by the author himself. A significant cinematic event, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (trailer here) opens this Friday in New York.

As with any self-respecting epic, Midnight begins not with its protagonist, but with his grandparents’ generation. Saleem Sinai would certainly seem to have Dr. Aadam Aziz’s nose, but he does not have his grandfather’s blood.  A Muslim proponent of a unified India, Dr. Aziz harbors a fellow moderate political leader from separatist extremists. Unfortunately, Aziz’s allies wind up on the losing side of history, resulting in a family schism.  Saleem starts life as the son of Aziz’s daughter and an ambitious businessman, but he was actually the child of a destitute street performer, impulsively switched at birth by his nurse and future nanny, Mary Peirera.

Sinai and Shiva, the boy whose life he unknowingly usurped, were born at the stroke of midnight on Independence Day, August 15, 1947.  All “Midnight’s Children” have special powers, but Sinai serves as the glue holding them together, hosting telepathic conferences with the help of his uncanny nose.  Sinai quickly forms a bond with Parvati-the-Witch, a young girl with real magical powers. Shiva however, is openly resentful of Sinai’s privileged life and the sheepishness of his fellow Midnight Children.  Over the succeeding decades, their fates will become intertwined as they participate as bit players in the India-Pakistan Wars, the creation of Bangladesh, and Indira Gandhi’s oppressive State of Emergency.

The Iranian government did not want you to see this film.  It is not even about Iran, but anything by the author of The Satanic Verses is apparently enough to send the mad mullahs into apoplexy. Fortunately, after a 92 hour shut down precipitated by the Iranian ambassador’s protests, the Sri Lankan President decided to act civilized and allow production to continue.  The film resulting from the necessarily rushed shoot is quite a powerful work.

The very premise of the psychically linked Midnight’s Children personifying the newly independent India has deep resonance.  When Sinai acknowledges the failure of this special generation (and India by extension), it is a heavy moment.  As Rushdie’s surrogate, Sinai cuts through the propaganda, calling out India’s government and society for failing to live up to its professed democratic ideals.  Yet, the film is also inspiring, explicitly placing its hopes on the next generation to make due on the promise of the children of 1947. From the vantage point of 2013, one could argue that they have indeed.

Watching Midnight’s Children, it is clear Rushdie is not ready to forgive and forget the excesses of Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency.  He is also highly critical of religious fundamentalism, clearly implying it is no accident of fate the relatively secular India routed the militantly Islamic Pakistan.  Indeed, the scenes in Islamabad are nearly as unsettling as those in Gandhi’s interrogation cells.

Satya Bhabha has some effective moments as the adult Sinai, but it is almost too much the allegorical everyman role for an actor to truly inhabit in a flesh and blood way.  In contrast, Siddharth (billed simply by his first name) is a genuinely malevolent presence as Shiva (named after the Hindu deity of destruction).  Likewise, Shriya Saran is wonderfully earthy and mysterious as Parvati-the-Witch. Jewel in the Crown veteran Charles Dance even lends his regal bearing as William Methwold, the dispossessed former owner of Sinai’s early family villa. Yet, it is the author’s warm, evocative voice that truly sets the tenor of the film.

For obvious reasons, Midnight’s Children will be a difficult film for many critics and commentators to get their heads around.  Yet, the magical realist trappings illuminate rather than obscure the country’s awkward Twentieth Century history.  Frankly, the Raj does not always look so bad, compared to some of what follows.  While the one hundred forty-six minute running feels just a tad long, Mehta wrangles decades of subtly fantastical material into a logical and accessible narrative.  Highly recommended, Midnight’s Children opens this Friday (4/26) in New York at the Angelika Film Center downtown and the Beekman uptown.