Film Reviews | Intouchables & Cocktail

Saccharine sweet

Les Intouchables, which released in France around a year ago, has been declared one of the most successful French films ever. Its success, and indeed the film itself, is a testimony to just one disturbing reality: France, once the intellectual capital of the world, is yet to engage with its racial tensions with any degree of maturity.

It is a clumsy film about two men, polar opposites in character and social standing. The differences between them are defined entirely by their being white Caucasian and black African.

Philippe (François Cluzet) is an ashen-faced man paralysed from the neck down by a freakish accident. His lacklustre aristocracy means servants, an opulent mansion and cars he can’t drive. His teenage daughter is a truant. When Driss (Omar Sy), a black, jobless man, joins as his attendant, only to ensure he is entitled to welfare dole for the unemployed, this rambling house is stirred up.

Despite floundering initially, Driss extracts chuckles out of the bored aristocrat, even forcing him to call a woman he has been writing vapid love letters to. Driss, on the other hand, hits on a blonde worker in the house, listens only to funky music—“it’s music only when you can dance to it”—and smokes marijuana. White people are stifled, dull worshippers of classical music, while black men can shake their behind without inhibitions. Driss shakes the daughter out of her angsty torpor—man from the street educating wealthy brat on the futility of being a rebel, it simply adds to the fakeness that coats Intouchables till its climactic resolution. The clichés become progressively more embarrassing.

Cluzet, even with his acting acumen, is overshadowed by the shallow story. Sy gets the pitch of the story and he plays the role with an awkward posturing.

Barring a few heart-warming scenes, Intouchables is a big bore.

Cocktail

Homi Adajania’s Cocktail begins with promise—with an unlikely friendship between two women, a doomed romance between a man and a woman, and some chuckle-inducing humour. None of these characters appear cardboard. But soon the film turns repetitive, tedious, and worst of all, reaffirms all the Bollywood stereotypes there are. The free-spirited woman turns coy and an Indian bride-wannabe, showing utmost eagerness to cook biryani and “that thing with the yogurt” (raita); the irresponsible, idiotic hero—charming in some scenes but a ham nonetheless—shifts his attention to the girl who fits into domesticity. When the three friends are thrown apart from each other, the really annoying part of the film begins. The story does not really move from there. Writer Imtiaz Ali is possibly at his worst in this film—pointless scenes drag the film to a predictable climax.

Cocktail looks pretty. It is coated in neon gloss. The gimmicks are old—jump cuts, fast-forwards and music video-style visuals saturated in artificial colour. The costumes, sets and overall production design are hip. But none of it eventually matters because it is one of those romcoms which, while reaffirming the love-conquers-all formula, tests your patience.

The friendship between the two girls is one of the script’s redeeming features. It has some warm moments. In the first hour, the humour is crackling. An effortlessly essayed role by Dimple Kapadia as Gautam’s overbearing mother from Delhi induces some genuine chuckles, although there are no real surprises from anything or anybody in this film.

Khan is sorely mismatched with the two women. His role has no edge, and he can’t add much to it. Padukone is sparkling in the first hour, but her transformation is not convincing. Penty’s debut shows little more than clean, conventional good looks. She does not have charisma or heft as an actor.

Cocktail, meant for the 20-something audience, is not a breezy watch. As a romcom, it fails in that essential criteria.

Cocktail and Intouchables released in theatres on Friday.

sanjukta.s@livemint.com