Note: Shanghaied means “When you discover that something you ordered off the internet turns out to be a cheap, made in China piece of crap.”
Shanghai. What a promising movie! Abhay Deol, Emraan Hashmi, Kalki and a creepily Anurag Kashyap lookalike and Dibaker Banerjee all in one. Amazing setting. Very topical. Good direction. Based on the 1966 book ‘Z’ by Vassilis Vassilikos. Everything is very very promising. But.. but.. it remains just that. A promising movie and what a broken promise it ends up being.
Shanghai. What a promising movie! Abhay Deol, Emraan Hashmi, Kalki and a creepily Anurag Kashyap lookalike and Dibaker Banerjee all in one. Amazing setting. Very topical. Good direction. Based on the 1966 book ‘Z’ by Vassilis Vassilikos. Everything is very very promising. But.. but.. it remains just that. A promising movie and what a broken promise it ends up being.
So what went wrong with something that’d the
potential of becoming the face of Indian films? Akira Kurosawa’s famous
statement on Satyajit Ray “Not to
have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun
or the moon” could have as well applied to Dibakar, after this movie. But he is
a long way from getting there. After Khosla ka Ghosla, Oye! Lucky Lucky Oye! and
the unconventional LSD, made Banerjee quite a director. But, was he ready to
take on something as brilliant as the story of ‘Z’?
First a li’l
background on ‘Z’ will help you see my point. The book is based on a vaguely
fictionalized version of the assassination of a Greek democrat Grigoris Lambrakis, under a military dictatorship. ‘Z’
translates to- He Lives. Implying, Lambrakis still lives. Now, Shanghai is
supposedly based on this book. But I beg to differ. What Dibakar really did was
that he watched the 1969 adaptation of the book ‘Z’ directed by a man who was
kicked out of Greece because of radical ideation and of course, his movies. The
man in question was Costa Gavras.
Now, the movie ‘Z’ is a political cry
of rage! It was a finger shoved up the asses of the government. An exclamation,
posed as a question to the military dictatorship that ruled Greece when the movie was made.
This movie was made by a man who was constantly in and out of jail because he
believed in his movies. His father had
been a communist, and was imprisoned after the war as a suspected communist and
thus, his father's fate fucked him up and he could not get into any university
or move to the U.S.A, so after high school Costa Gavras went to France, where
he began his studies of law in 1951. His father's political blacklisting barred
him from Greek university. And so, you can understand how pissed he was when he
made the movie. He truly believed that Grigoris Lambrakis still lives.
Mikis Theodorakis, the music director was imprisoned when he composed the
music for ‘Z’. He smuggled the music out! Do you read the passion of the men
who made ‘Z’?
In the movie,
world class actors like, Irene Papas and Yves Montand play such minuscule
roles, it’s almost a laugh. The lead roles are played by relatively smaller
stars, but giving a stellar performance. He did not need a Deol or a Hashmi to
get across what he felt. The emotion just makes the movie. The movie starts with the following ‘claimer’
“Any resemblance to real events,
to persons dead or living, is not accidental. It is INTENTIONAL.” Now,
THAT is having balls!
Zoom back to
Shanghai. It has a disclaimer that reads, “All characters appearing in this
work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.” And yes, the characters in Shanghai are fictitious. They
never live beyond the fourth wall of the screen! They fall short of what could
have lived. A true ‘Z’ never came alive.
Dibakar never
felt that emotion, that frustration. It is just another of those movies that
tries to speak out, but dies a squeaky death. It is not honest enough! He just
saw a brilliant French movie by a Greek director, remade it and told everyone
that he made it from a book whose author’s name can hardly be pronounced. Oooo!
So fancy! Ass! In my view, he fucked up his credentials. I got into movies
because of ‘Z’ and now; he is forcing me out of them, with Shanghai!
It is just sad. Really,
sad. Pathetic to see an Oscar winning movie(Not that Oscars have ever been a
standard for a good movie) die in the hands of a guy who took on too much than
he could. Maybe it’s unfair to compare. But, it was HE who flicked ‘Z’ SCENE BY
SCENE and then Indianizes it, and does not even show the sexy Court-Marshall
ending of the movie.
Shanghai in the
end just Shanghaied. Eh! Dibakar, Agli baar kuch aur copy karna! ‘Z’
is too much for one man to take. In the end, ‘He Lives’. ‘He Lives.’
