Page 106 - October 2018 converted

bursting into flames whenever things spiral out of control, with a little nudge
from the sisters. And there’s nothing that their loving father Bapu (Raaz) nor the
respective men in their lives (Duhan and Das) can do which will change things.
This is a wonderful ensemble cast. The village rich guy (Verma), festooned with
gold chains, who lusts after the two feuding sisters; the Naarad Muni type ‘fami-
ly friend’ called Dipper (Grover); the googly-eyed ‘vaid’, the wise old ‘daadi’; the
two who play the lovers-cum-spouses of the two sisters; Raaz, pitch–perfect as
the father, all work in tandem.
Bharadwaj’s touch with names is in evidence here too. One of my all-time fa-

vourites, Billo Chaman Bahaar, from Omkara, is almost trumped here by Dipper,
movie review called thus because he has a lazy eye, which keeps ‘dipping’. And in the way

Genda is called ‘Marigold’ by her besotted lover.
The girls take some getting used to: you have to suspend disbelief to take these
dusty, filthy-mouthed sisters seriously. But once they start settling into their roles,
you cross a hump, and then you swing, as they do, from one fight to another,
as they cross from their parental home to their

marital ‘aangan’, and discover, to their horror,
that they are together again. Both Madan, who
Pataakha movie cast: is quite a sparkler again in her upcoming Mard
Vijay Raaz, Sanya Malhotra, Radhika Madan, Namit Ko Dard Nahin Hota, and Malhotra, have their

Das, Saanand Varma, Abhishek Duhan moments, even if they make you want to reach
out and wipe the grime off their faces, and tell

Director: Vishal Bharadwaj them to calm down, enough already.
This film reminded me a little of Matru Ki Bijli

Review: Ka Mandola. Clearly, Bharadwaj has a thing for
Somewhere in rural Rajasthan, two sisters are born cows. Matru had a hallucinatory pink one; here
fighting, and they keep fighting. With everything there are your regular ‘desi’ ones, which Badki

they’ve got: imaginative ‘gaalis’, fists, kicks, wres- loves. But unlike Matru, Pataakha doesn’t lose
tler-style moves. Their fights are the stuff of village sight of its suitably nutty comic tone (there’s
‘tamasha’, with people gathering and cheering, a nice sly dig about ‘swacch Bharat’). Who
as the two beat, punch and fling each other to the doesn’t know that homes can be the most vi-
ground, and have to be pulled apart, mostly by their cious battle-grounds?
hapless father. I’ve always maintained that Bharadwaj is great with set-up and dwindles as a fin-
It took me a while to fully get into the film. Why do isher. Happy to be proved wrong this time around. Pataakha’s ending is a crack-
these sisters look as if they do not bathe for days er. Why do Badki and Chutki fight? The no answer is the answer which powers
on end? Their matted hair and unwashed faces dis- this parable, which keeps referring in a fairly simplistic one-track manner to India

tracted me, as did their thick accents which feel faux and Pakistan whenever Badki and Chukti are at each other’s throats. Like the
in the beginning. Why are they fighting in the first two sisters, why do the countries fight? Why did they start in the first place? Why
place? can’t they ‘do jhappi’ and for-
But soon enough, it is clear that everything is work- give each other their real and
ing to a design. Vishal Bharadwaj’s Pataakha, based imagined sins and live hap-
on Charan Singh Pathik’s short story Do Behnein, pily ever after? Bharadwaj’s
has managed to pull off a rousing parable. placing Israel-Palestine, and

Bharadwaj, who has also written the film, doesn’t North and South Korea in the
waste a second in centre-staging the two sisters same forgive-and-forget cat-
Badki Champa (Madan) and Chutki Genda (Malho- egory is a huge stretch, but
tra) and their animosity, which simmers all the time, what are movies for if not for
wishful thinking?

106 |DALLAS | OCTOBER 2018 | VOL 157 www.thebmagazine.com