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In all these movies, the makers deliver on the promise of the prem­ise. They play on characters’ para­noia and keep peeling off the murky layers towards the big reveal at the end. But Baaghi 2 delivers paranoia of a different kind. The kind that assaults audience with excruciat­ingly high-strung action sequences synced to earsplitting background scores. These tactics of director Ahmed Khan are clearly overdone.

The plot: Military man Ranvir Pratap Singh aka Ronnie (Tiger Shroff), who is serving at the Kash­mir border, gets a call from his for­mer lover Riya (Disha Patani) out of the blue. Riya sounds distressed and wants Ronnie’s help. She doesn’t get into specifics but this is enough for Ronnie to take a one week leave from his base and travel all the way to Goa to meet her. There, Riya reveals to Ronnie the kidnapping of her daughter two months ago. She has exhausted all options and the police are to shut the case for lack of leads. Now it’s up to Ronnie to help Riya find her daughter.

Choreographer-turned-director Ahmed Khan is least bothered in taming Tiger Shroff, so he lets him loose. Shroff is given every possi­ble opportunity to showcase his dance moves and combat skills. It would then be redundant to point out that the story is driven not by its protagonist but according to the convenience of its star. Shroff is an ideal action star and above all this is an action thriller. He looks intensely charged up in action sequences and one can only imagine the hours it took to choreograph and shoot them with precision.

Pushing the central story in the backseat in favor of spectac­ular stunts makes the movie lose its urgency and purpose. Going back and forth to show the back­story of Ronnie and Riya’s doomed romance, and loaded with unnec­essary fight sequences and dance numbers, the actual investigative element of the story gets a short shift. When it dawns that they’ve wasted big chunk of screentime without moving the plot, Ahmed Khan and his writers all-too-con­veniently drop clues right in front of Ronnie that he can tail. I was left thinking: why didn’t they make Shroff’s character a shrewd investi­gator rather than a killing machine? That would have been a more fitting characterization.

As Shroff enjoys center-stage, seasoned actors like Manoj Bajpayee, Randeep Hooda and Deepak Dobriyal make do with whatever little elbow room they get. Hooda in particular has a few good scenes where he keeps the tone of the movie light and playful. And it’s great to see Prateik Babbar return to acting after his trouble with drug addiction. Ironically, though, he plays a coke addict.

Whatever substance Baaghi 2 misses, it tries to cover up with elaborate action scenes. A refresh­ing spin on the traditional action hero template would have given us a better movie. But at two hours and twenty-five minutes, the final product feels overstretched and endlessly boring for a straightfor­ward action thriller.

Two stars

POEMS

The Sun and Her Flowers

Rupi Kaur

Published: October 3, 2017

Pages : 256 (paperback)

 Rupi Kaur has achieved a rare feat for a mod­ern poet: mainstream popularity. Part of a new generation of instapoets—young poets publishing verse primarily on social media—Kaur, 25, pairs her dreamy, aphoristic poems with doodles reminiscent of those found in the margins of old school books. Now comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry: a vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honor­ing one’s roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself.

Divided into five chapters and illustrated by Kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms.

this is the recipe of life
said my mother
as she held me in her arms as i wept
think of those flowers you plant
in the garden each year
they will teach you
that people too
must wilt
fall
root
rise
in order to bloom
***
what is stronger
than the human heart
which shatters over and over
and still lives
***
you left
and i wanted you still
yet i deserved someone
who was willing to stay

 Adapted from reviews in The Guardian and Amazon

 Comedy

SATRU GATE

CAST: Madan Krishna Shrestha, Hari Bansha Acharya, Deepak Raj Giri, Deepa Shree Niraula, Paul Shah, Anchal Sharma, Priyanka Karki

DIRECTION: Pradip Bhattarai

 Next-door neighbors Suraj (Paul Shah) and Sandhya (Anchal Sharma) are lovers and are destined to get hitched soon. The two families are preparing for the wedding but Suraj’s father (Hari Bansha Acharya) is still apprehen­sive about getting his son married to the daughter of his sworn enemy, a corrupt politician played by Ramesh Ranjan. He tries to reason with his wife (Deepashree Niraula) and son to back out. But what is a loving father to do when his son’s adamant to marry the girl of his choice? The opening 15 minutes of ‘Satru Gate’ set it up as a regular ‘slice of life’ centered on a big, fat Nepali wedding. But hang on! Director Pradip Bhattarai and his co-writer Deepak Raj Giri aren’t here to offer you a sober family entertainer. Their aim is rather to stretch the comedy to the extreme and push the story forcefully to a chaotic route. They model their film as a South Indian masala entertainer, piling it with multiple sub-plots driven by illogical twists every 15 minutes or so.

The movie moves at lightning speed. In this family mix, out of nowhere, a tantric baba is thrown in. He demands Suraj and Sandhya’s matrimony be stopped as their alli­ance will anger the holy spirits. Then a troublemaker Rahul (Deepak Raj Giri) moves into the neighborhood. He happens to be a YouTube vlog­ger who upsets the neighborhood’s harmony by spying on his neighbors to create sensational content for his YouTube channel.

One of his stunts goes too far, jeop­ardizing Suraj and Sandhya’s wed­ding and creating a feud between their families. After that Satru Gate shows no trace of being a wedding movie and ventures into a battle of wits between the characters of Hari Bansha Acharya character and Deepak Raj Giri. A few more eye-roll inducing plot twists later, the film shifts from Kathmandu to Tarai where Sandhya’s made to marry someone else while Suraj and his father decide to crash her wedding to rescue her. But until that point, keeping track of the story becomes a tedious chore.

Heavyweight comedians Acharya and Giri disappoint as they rarely come out of their comfort zone. Acharya does what he does best, playing a clownish man-child. He approaches this role by only slightly twisting his Hari Bahadur character that he has immortalized over the years. Similarly, Giri swaggers back to the cool-dude baddie he played in both installments of ‘Chakka Panja’. The two overshadow the youngsters Paul Shah and Anchal Sharma. It feels like the two are doing extended cameos in a movie that begins with them as protagonists.

This is director Bhattarai’s follow up to 2016’s ‘Jatra’. While he was successful in weaving together three distinct characters to blend a coher­ent story in ‘Jatra’, he’s weighed down by the massive cast and nev­er-ending sub-plots in Satru Gate. He flips from one scene to another as if he is a guide who wants to give his audience the tour of the entire world in just two hours. This is mentally draining on the audience.

Laughs in the movie mostly come from cheap digs at some­one’s appearance or misogynistic one-liners. It is ironic that after all the randomness and lapse of logic, the movie wants to ends as a socially aware work celebrating Nepal’s cul­tural diversity.

Satru Gate was not made with the audience’s intelligence in mind. It was made solely as a vanity proj­ect for Hari Bansha Acharya and Deepak Raj Giri to shoehorn their old-school comic sensibilities into a money-spinning masala movie.

2 stars **

SHORT STORIES

Men without Women

Haruki Murakami

Published: August 2017

Publisher: Random House UK

Pages : 240 pages (hardcover)

Haruki Murakami, as the master of strangeness and surrealism, might more than occasionally leave us confused by blurring the lines between reality and dreams in his stories. But the seemingly connected tales in this recent collection of short stories, ‘Men Without Women’, Murakami’s first in more than a decade, feel a lot more developed and realistic compared to the surreal stories in Murakami’s 2006 collection ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’. In ‘Men Without Women’, as his characters try to grapple with the fact that they are alone, Murakami, for the first time, doesn’t roman­ticize the concept of being lonely. Instead, the stories are about love, loss, and pain—the very elements that are the driving forces of life. And though it feels un-Murakami like, it’s a refreshing change for those who have had a little too much of the writer’s obsessions with jazz, whiskey drinkers at bars, and van­ishing cats—though there are hints of these in ‘Men Without Women’ too.

Most of the middle-aged men in these seven tales, four of which have been previously published, have lost the women in their lives—to other men or death, and they are thus lonely.

This puts them in a situation Murakami terms ‘Men Without Women’. Though the stories are essentially about men and nar­rated by men, women hold an important place in each of the tales, even though they remain somewhat mysterious.

In the first story, an actor, whose wife has died, hires a young woman driver to take him to the theater and bring him back home. During the commute, he talks about how he was always faithful to his wife, even though she had many lovers. He even confesses that he took to meet­ing one of them at bars to talk about her and somehow get his revenge but, in the end, manages to rise above it.

There is another story where a housewife visits a man at his retire­ment home to bring his groceries and then they have sex, following which she tells him bizarre sto­ries. Then there is an unmarried 50-something plastic surgeon with a long list of girlfriends with whom he enjoys wine, conversation, and sex, ‘a discreet pleasure but never the goal’, until he falls hopelessly in love with one of them.

In yet another story, a man gets a call at one in the morning from the husband of a former girlfriend, whom he has not been in touch with for years, to tell him she has commit­ted suicide.

Studies say loneliness can be lethal. In ‘Men without Women’ it is said to be deep-seated like ‘a red wine stain on a pastel carpet’. And while that might be true, the varied ways in which the characters in the stories deal with it make you realize that, while loneliness is at the crux of our existence and there is no escaping it, we will all eventually find a way to embrace it.