16th
Kaminey
All in all I thought it was a great film, if one that was ended a bit lazily. There were aspects of the film that were absolutely brilliant: the gay, violent sexual tension between Shahid Kapoor and Chandan Roy Sanyal (the signature Dhan Te Nah dance move was brilliant); giving the badass identical twin a defect where he pronounces the S sound with the F sound (“paisa kamane ke do raafte hote hai, ek fortcut aur dusara fort fortcut”) undercut any seriousness and gave the film a humorous, playful edge while building sympathy for the character; and Priyanka Chopra masterfully executed her role - you were never quite sure whether her character was a deviant or just a good girl in an unfortunate situation. There were more subtle brilliant moments in the movie - the marriage scene where Priyanka Chopra busts out the old-school raunchy chest thump and then switches it over to the good girl version accomplishes a number of things simultaneously, heightening the ambiguity of her character’s nature (she does both of those tooo perfectly) and reinforcing the faux-realism of the film by playfully caricaturing old Bollywood stereotypes. The film shares something with 13B – they both fit Indian culture, if such a thing exists, into genre film templates made famous in the west. In 13B it was horror, where the perfect two parent, two child family was replaced with a joint family and in Kaminey it’s the Quintin Tarentino action thriller template infused with the intersection of Indian regional pride, corruption, marital politics and politics politics. This kind of successful adaptation is interesting I think and the strong reactions it invokes in people probably touches on an interesting conversation about Indian identity, if such a thing exists.
