Why Shanghai Shanghaied?: TKHK reviews Shanghai

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.

 

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.’

Dialogue of the day: He Lives. ('Z', 1969)