Heroine

In the filmy world which is dominated by heroes it is indeed a good thing to see a film from the heroine's point of view but this heroine deserved a better director.

Heroine starts from the point where Mahie Arora (Kareena Kapoor) is in a troubled relationship with Aryan Khanna (Arjun Rampal). Picking up from there it delves into the inner mind and the outer world of Mahie. The need to be loved and the need to be successful makes a mess of her life.

Right from the beginning the tiny parts that form the world around heroine Mahie Arora started irritating me, especially the actor who played the part of her friend called Rats. Because of this bad casting it took me some time to focus on the story. In my head I was screaming 'get this director a good casting director'. Also words like Babes, Baby and Bro (Hansal Mehta has written a wonderful post on the word bro. Do read) were grating on my nerves. When you create a world of Bollywood it is these smaller parts that make a huge difference in supporting the leads. They are also an important tool for the audience to believe in the world the director is creating. This year is filled with such examples but heroine fails big time on this front. Except Arjun Rampal and Kareena Kapoor not a single actor or actress look like the star they are supposed to project themselves as. Thank god for Divya Dutta, Shahana Goswami (though it was difficult to focus on her face) & Ranvir Shorey. Those were the only characters/actors which made some sense in this film and the performances I enjoyed watching.

By the end of the film I was feeling sorry for Kareena who put in so much effort and was good too but if the film is not good you will have to be a true blue fan of hers to sit through this bore fest.

If your staple diet is made up of tabloid stories from Bollywood trust me you have read/seen it all.

Word of mouth - An actor is as good or bad as her choice of films and Kareena Kapoor proves it by choosing to work in a Madhur Bhandarkar film.

Rating - ** (Below Average)

In a sequence from the film, a bystander comments on how Mahi the actress should be content with being a decoration in a film grossing 100 crores, instead of looking for something meaningful. Echoing Kareena Kapoor's body of work since the last few years (bit roles in mega buck films like Bodyguard, Ra.one) and her attempt at a national award with Heroine, this is perhaps the closest that Madhur Bhandarkar's latest gets to anything real. For the rest of it, Heroine is labored long and forced.

Mahi Arora, played by Kareena, is a heroine on the decline. Film offers are getting scarcer, affairs with married superstars ending in disappointments and her mental insecurities spiraling out of control. The film charts her course to oblivion while exposing the underbelly of Bollywood. Or so it hopes to on paper at least.

Keeping with the world of a Bhandarkar film, Heroine is brazen sensational and populated by stereotypes- a gay designer a bitchy fare weather friend, a no nonsense PR, sundry party people who only go to parties so they can make snide comments on even the floor and the walls and so on. That the director is extremely smug in his own world is evident from the fact that many of the actors playing these roles remain the same from Page 3 to Fashion to Corporate to Heroine. While the earlier of Bhandarkar's films had the novelty of the fly on the wall storytelling, Heroine suffers from the repetition and predictability that brings with it. Not only does his technique reek of a de ja vu, his research too is insufficient, not moving beyond the gossip pages of a film magazine.

Heroine suffers from a heavy sense of staleness. The story is predictable, the dialogues corny and cringe worthy. The stereotypes grating, every woman is sluty, smokes and drinks non stop while the men are either gay or too much of cowards to admit they are gay. The twists and turns don't shock you anymore and with a really long second half, Heroine becomes gets really tiring to sit through.

The saving grace here, to some extent, is Kareena. She has a role to speak of in her films after a really long time. She digs into her part with sincerity. After ten years in the industry, she knows how the machine works and that shows in her performance. She is let down however by a very unflattering characterization- an insecure leading lady with bipolar disorder because she is from a broken family and had a troubled childhood, nothing can get more clich\xe9d than that- and some lousy direction.

As Mahi, Kareena tries real hard to impress, she is hysterical she spells evil through her gaze, yet she is most effective towards the end when all she does is stare silently as her world shatters into pieces around her. It is a pity indeed that more than her herculean effort, it is the supporting performances of Shahana Goswami and Divya Dutta that leave a much stronger impression.

Dangerously treading the thin line between sensational and bold, Heroine disappoints due to its complete lack of novelty, depth, subtlety and finesse. The only one having the last laugh right now must be a certain Ms. Bachchan at having not missed much by opting out of this one .

The promos didnt look fresh and the songs didnt quite pick up, but I still thought lets give Heroine a chance.
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How did it fare? Insanely tiring & far from fun, this one makes you feel bad for Kareena. She deserves better.

Mahi Arora (Kareena) is a star with a bipolar disorder. She is big in the industry & dating superstar Aryan Khanna (Arjun Rampal). He doesnt quite marry her & she goes crazy. She then has a downfall and rises again and goes down again and rises again...and goes...never mind.
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At some point (12 minutes in), you realize that Madhur Bhandarkar has rehashed his previous films and thrown Heroine at us.
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It has his usual elements of gay characters, lame socialites, shady politicians & most of the Page 3 Fashion cast reprising the same roles.

Kareena looks stunning & genuinely does a goo job. Sadly, the script doesnt support her. Randeep Hooda & Arjun Rampal ham their way through the film. Shahana Goswami is great.

I wonder why Madhur.B would rehash a crappy version of his earlier films and throw it back at us. This one is not worth watching. Though it gives you a fresh feeling, really! I felt so relaxed and stress free after a deep sleep. Kidding. It doesnt let you.

Heroine is a film that will suffer from being a Madhur Bhandarkar film. Bhandarkar stopped being a filmmaker after Chandni Bar (2001). He became a charlatan with superficial exposes of various professions from journalism to fashion, this man claims to have seen it all. Now he decides to tackle another one, which you may think he would know a lot about: the film industry. Sadly, the stuff he knows is hard to call insightful, can be counted on your fingers and pointed out in every film of his. The fact that our industry and audience considers him a filmmaker is a mystery to me. His films show utter lack of talent, a man who relies on manipulative sensationalism and this time he is given more money to make trash.

The film begins with Mahi Arora (Kareena Kapoor) being thrown out of a car, with gothic tears on her face, she says the word "bastard" and begins to smoke. You know you're in the painfully torturous world of Bhandarkar's cinema. The next half an hour is on autopilot. Aryan (Arjun Rampal) is a womanizing superstar. He isn't in love with Mahi but never admits it to her.

I was prepared to watch another film of his which annoys and disturbs my intellect. His portrayal of women is extremely shallow, with the men being even more so. But then I saw a character, which IS shallow. Now, that's interesting. I started finding Bhandarkar trying to break his mold, beginning to crack open the shell.The story isn't a replica of his previous films. It isn't a small town girl who comes to the big city and gets possessed by the demons of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs. Oh yes, if you don't know already Mr. Bhandarkar says these are vices for any girl. He also looks down on homosexuality; this time there is also bisexuality. It isn't just foolish, but also heavily shameful.

Whenever Heroine starts to become a good film, it quickly manages to become a bad one. Take for example a sub-plot involving an art-house filmmaker and Mahi's confrontation with real acting. She also begins to find a friend. The conclusion of this strand of the plot is such a major cop-out as it falls under the curse of being a film by Madhur Bhandarkar. It wants to be a character study but it begins to falter as when it can't handle the weight of it. A character that can't differentiate between her personal life and her professional life. But when Aryan also gets advice from someone that he should learn how to differentiate between the two, it becomes a film with bogus ideas and incessant stereotyping of an entire field of work. This could have been a very good film about a girl who is hopelessly lost and has no idea how to redeem herself. If only it wasn't stuck in Bhandarkar's limited and idiotic vision. Not to mention, characters who frequently say "bastard" and "babes".

I have always adored Kareena Kapoor. I empathized with her character mainly because she plays it. There is absolutely no harm in casting a star, a likable face to play a character which is unlikable. The part where I was really beginning to appreciate the film was when her character becomes repulsive. Priyanka Chopra's character in Fashion (2008) had the audience rooting for her, Mahi on the other hand won't find many takers. This is exactly why I did not hate the film. Realistically, India is not a country which embraces anti-heroes on screen. An anti-heroine is a long shot. We have seen films like The Dirty Picture, Fashion and even Raaz 3, where the women aren't exactly goddesses. But even those characters had some way of redeeming themselves, in death or in turning over a new leaf. Most importantly those films had masala and were entertaining. Bhandarkar always resorted to masala as cover. His cover will finally be blown; it's unfortunate that it will be done with this film and not Fashion. Heroine isn't entertaining and the redemption is hollow and that's probably the reason why the film would get bad word of mouth.

I may begin to sound like I like the film and if I did I would defend it by having an argument but I don't. I like that the film doesn't follow the run-of-the-mill trajectory of fame and then downfall. The film is largely about her downfall and I admit that I felt for Mahi in parts. Funny that the film has a scene with the poster of Citizen Kane (1941) in the background. A film considered an all time greatest. A film with an unlikable character and the people who knew him talking about who he was after he is dead. Funny that Heroine has three characters talking to the camera about the protagonist but here it looks like spoon-feeding where we are treated as gullible bait. Funny that Heroine strives for such high ambition but has nothing to show for it. In the hands of a gifted filmmaker, this would be a compelling watch. In the hands of a hack, it is an embarrassing debacle.

Let's kick start the innings with a sneak peek into the Cast & Crew

Cast:

Mahie “Bipolar-nonchalant-commitment-phobic” Arora - Kareena Kapoor

Aryan “Moody-Macho-Superstar-Lover-Father” Khanna - Arjun Rampal

Angad “All-I-need-is-Cricket-and-Actresses” Paul - Randeep Hooda

Protima “I-have-methods-to-teach-method-acting” Roy - Shahana Goswami

Pallavi “Branding-and-stardom-go-hand-in-hand” Narayan - Divya Dutta

Abbas “I-am-an-Actor-Editor-Director” Khan - Sanjay Suri

Ria “I-don't-accept-debut-awards” Mehra - Mugdha Godse

Tapan “Don't-teach-me-film-making” Da - Ranvir Shourey

Shagufta “I-am-used-to-all-this” Ali - Helen

Rashid “I-am-an-eternal-loyal” Bhai - Govind Namdeo

Music, Editor, Camera and other technical department:

“What-can-we-do-when-there-is-no-scope”

Director:

Madhur “I-am-the-mouth-piece-of-INDUSTRY” Bhandarkar

The director's obsession with “set people” is prevalent since time immemorial. He opened his innings with Page 3 set, then in the middle-overs he sailed through murky waters of Fashion set, and now his muse has reached the slog-overs with an outlandish design of Heroine set. Madhur Bhandarkar has spent a meaty time in the industry, but, what should probably take shape from an insider's insight turns into a prevarication resulting in slimy sketches of characters, err, caricatures. Sometimes, the characters are believable and many a time they are so excruciating that you can't stomach them any further. Thus making “Heroine” a lackluster and detestably loooooong story of a star/heroine/actress (I thought all these terms can be used alternately, but there's a difference and every term is explained in the film) Mahi Arora, narrated without quip, ponderousness or ingenuity.

The movie opens with a mishap in Mahie's life and the narrative moves back in time to show where it all began - Heroine on her career's pinnacle. Her relationships, her rise and fall from stardom owing to her moody and impulsive behavior form the major chunk of the film. Despite the predictable follow of events, the movie has some glorious moments where the audience becomes aghast with an uncanny depiction of people connected to the industry. But with time, these stereotypical set pieces pile up, and Bhandarkar being the film's co-writer passes the blame game baton to bad parentage which results in peevish behavior of Mahie.

The characters are akin to real-life stars, and everything we have read or heard about Bollywood is thrown onto the giant canvas made by Madhur. He shows an adamant art house Bengali director who cribs about tight budget and gives Mahie just an hour to memorize a four page dialogue but takes whole 9 months to complete only half the film - Mr Bhandarkar, is it character elevation or character assassination?! The other players completing the lineup are: the ubiquitous paparazzi, the impression of debauchery, a lesbian act, the existence of casting couch, a manipulative male star, page 3 people who smoke and drink round-the-clock, and a PR executive - a person with myriad equations and calculations and she says, “I create brands.”

The only bankable factor in the film is Kareena Kapoor's performance, albeit there isn't any string of surprises to that. A few scenes add life to the film, but the trite dialogues take away all the sheen - You can hear the word “industry” zillion times in the film. After an excruciatingly chewing-gummish pre-climax sequence, like in every film of Rise-and-fall-in-film-industry genre, people close to Mahie walk out of her life and she succumbs to seemingly implausible ways to bring back her lost smile. After bombarding the star with every piece he could assimilate from the Pandora's Box, now “Mr Preacher” Bhandarkar expects some HOPE, and takes the route of leaving the stardom to negate the harrowing past that (according to him) is inevitable in the life of every HEROINE!!

Bottom-line:

The movie falls prey to the formulaic template of film-making - An entertaining first half that eventually drops into a splash of post interval melodrama. Despite some moments of glory, the film remains a twine of dreary banalities. The caricatured characters fill the screen space and the screenplay wanders through many streets, at times induces sleep, and ultimately loses its destination. Madhur Bhandarkar should realize that if he makes a rehashed version of his earlier films, it may result in an inevitable damp squib. Let's seal the innings with this line - Watch Heroine for Kareena's superlative performance or watch it on your TV sets this Diwali (I hope this time my predictometer will be bang on).