So, I put up a bullet point version of this already (the notes I dashed off as soon as I got home so I wouldn’t forget), and a quick spoiler-less review.  And the second half of the recap is now up also, it is here.  And now, it is time for me to give a complete detailed summary!  For those of you unable, or unwilling, to see it in theaters!  Or if you want to see it, but to have my in your head with you whispering opinions the whole time.

I can tell you, without spoilers, that the best part of the whole experience was the truly tiny little girl with an itsy-bitsy little pink coat and bitty-baby pink boots who waved her microscopic little hand at me in the hall on the way out.  If possible, try to recreate that when you go.

And now, on with the show!

So, I missed the trailers, but I came in just as the credits started, which was perfect.  Gold and black VVC rectangle for Vidhu Vinod Chopra, and then we zoom through a CGI version of that cool new bridge I got to drive over last time I was in Bombay, and RELIANCE.  And then actual film starts.

We get dropped right into “Tere Bin”.  Which is really really pretty.  Both the sound and the visuals.  It starts with Farhan looking up in slow motion with a great sort of young and fresh smile on his face.  The camera moves out and around the room, revealing that he is looking up at Aditi Rao Hydari bending over to serve him tea in a living room surrounded by aunties and uncles.  Obviously, this is their first meeting, and he has been struck with joyous love at first sight.  The camera moves through the house, to find them again, in the same clothes, standing and talking on the porch of the house, and smiling.  Next shot, Farhan smiling again, lifting the groom’s jasmine veil in front of his face as he looks through the flower curtain to Aditi on the other side, as they get married in the same living room where they first met.  And then we continue to see their perfect life.  A baby is born, Farhan makes faces at it while Aditi laughs.  Farhan sits in police uniform with his colleagues, daughter on his lap, and watches Aditi dance at a police benefit.  Their daughter blows out a candle for her birthday while they cheer and she wears Minnie Mouse ears (is this not a copyright issue in India?  Even though Disney is there now?).  They watch her run and play at a children’s party.  The whole family squeezes into a photo booth and takes silly photos.  The camera slowly moves away from them to the outside of the booth, to watch the photo slowly print, their faces changing slightly in each frame.

(this is slightly different than the final film version, but still pretty good)

And, end!  Now there is no music and we are in a car.  Farhan is driving and having his daughter recite the rhymes she learned in nursery school (one two, buckle my shoe, and so on), while Aditi fiddles with her dancing bells (I want to say gunghra?  Is that right?  Hey!  Google says it is ghungroo!  I was really close!).  And the string breaks and the bells go everywhere.  Aditi gets all prettily upset, she is already late for a performance and now the ghunghroo is broken.  Farhan is all smiley and lowkey about it, pulls over in front of a little shopping strip, she jumps out and promises to be back in five minutes, doesn’t even want him to turn the car off.

This is fascinating!  There are little storefronts in Delhi where you can get your dancing bells re-strung while you wait?  Oh, and also, while Farhan is chatting with his tiny daughter in the car, he sees a big evil black SUV drive by and recognizes someone in the passenger seat.  He pulls out of the spot in front of the store (Farhan!  Send your daughter out of the car, and into the store with her mother!), and starts following the SUV, while also pulling out a cell phone and calling “Sartaji”  (which I kept hearing as “Sardarji”, but actually is pretty close to that, and he is pretty aggressively identified as Sikh, so I am going to stick with that) and telling him that he just saw “Big Bad Guy” who they thought was in Lahore, driving in a car in Delhi.  Sardarji is in one of those police control rooms they always have in movies and TV shows, you know, people at computers with headsets who never have any lines but are industriously staring at screens in the background the whole time the main character is pacing back and forth in the foreground talking on a cell phone.  So, yeah, Sardarji is going to send back-up, but in the meantime Farhan will keep following (Farhan!  Stop at this light and let your daughter OUT OF THE CAR!).

He keeps following, almost loses the car, yells at Sardarji that he needs back-up NOW, because he has his daughter in the car (this is what I have been saying, Farhan!), and then turns down an alley to see that the evil car has pulled over and people are getting out, Farhan tries to back out, hits a fire hydrant, and pretty pretty water starts spraying all over the scene.  Bad guys get out of the car pulling guns.  Farhan!  DIVE INTO THE BACKSEAT AND SHIELD YOUR DAUGHTER!  But instead of listening to me, he pulls out his gun and RETURNS FIRE.  HOW IS THIS POSSIBLY A GOOD IDEA?  He can’t possibly kill them all, so this is just going to make them angry and keep shooting at you, plus it is stopping you from PROTECTING YOUR DAUGHTER!  The only way it makes sense is if you are still thinking more about keeping the bad guys from getting away than PROTECTING YOUR DAUGHTER!

So, he shouts to the backseat for her to get down, but she can’t get the seatbelt undone, and he can’t go back and do it for her because he has to keep shooting, when he tries to do it, he gets shot in the side, then finally the bad guys pull out and go away and he can drive off with his daughter.  Who has now been shot.  BECAUSE HE IS THE WORST FATHER IN THE WORLD!

But it’s a pretty sequence, “Tere Bin” starts back up on the soundtrack, we see him carrying the daughter into the hospital and shouting for a doctor, Aditi showing up still in her dancing outfit and collapsing in slow-mo when she hears the news from a family friend, Farhan comes out looking blank and in shock with blood still on his shirt, Aditi attacks him and is pulled away.  Her reaction is is my reaction.  He looks very sad, but that was SO STUPID.  SUCH A BAD PARENT!  YOU SHOULD BE HIT!

And then Farhan wins me over with a really great acting moment.  They are at the funeral, his face is still just blank while he puts the sheet wrapped body in the grave (oh, they’re Muslim!  Did I tell you that?  They had the Muslim style wedding with the curtain instead of the Hindu style one with the fire).  And then he picks up a handful of dirt to toss in, and instead of tossing it, he just sort of flattens his hands out and it falls in.  It’s beautifully uncoordinated, a great moment where you can see that grief has so disabled him that he can’t even open or close his hands correctly.  Good on ya, Farhan!

And then we are at the funeral, and Sardarji comes over to talk to him and he is wearing a white turban to match his white funeral outfit!  That is so cool!  Anyway, he is also telling Farhan that Aditi doesn’t really want to live with him, or see him, or talk to him right now, so Sardarji suggests he come home and stay on his couch for now.  Sardarji, you are the best!  Stylin’ funeral outfit, AND solid marital advice, AND a place to crash when you need it?  I love you!  Why aren’t you the hero?  You would never go on a high speed dangerous chase with your daughter in the car!

So, yeah, funeral over, Sardarji is getting Farhan tucked in on his couch and giving him sleeping pills, promising they will put him out for at least 12 hours.  And while he is sitting there, slowly making his face change from in shock with grief funeral face to kind of drugged blinky eyes, he hears Sardarji talking in the kitchen, saying “yes, we can do it tonight, I just gave him sleeping pills, he will be out for 12 hours”.  On the other end, is someone else fulfilling the “man in foreground striding on phone” role at the communication center.  And then!  To confirm the info!  They conference in JOHN ABRAHAM!!!  Yes, JOHN ABRAHAM!!!  Who I really want to be playing either his role from Force or from Madras Cafe, in a great sort of combined universe Marvel’s Avengers type thing, but a universe of depressing revenge driven cops instead of superheros.  Anyway, JOHN ABRAHAM confirms that they are a go, they’ve tracked down the group of Big Bad Guys who were in the black SUV to an apartment in Delhi.  Only, they have to be sure to take the head Big Bad Guy alive so they can find out who his Delhi contact is.  Oh, and John Abraham is in a basement somewhere, with dimples and short hair.

(FORCE.  Look how cute they are in this!)

Cut to, elaborate mission control truck coordinating the SWAT attack on the apartment building.  The computer guys get to see the world!  Or at least, be in a slightly different geographic location while staring at a computer screen behind people taking aggressively on phones.  So, they are all coordinated and planned and focused on taking the bad guy alive, when suddenly Farhan appears!  Looking just like Ron Livingston in Office Space!  Remember, he was hypnotized to not care about anything and then he had that sort of zonked look in his eyes?

And then, action scene!  It’s really really good, and I’m not even going to attempt to describe it.  You should just wait until someone posts it illegally on youtube and watch it there.  There are four planes of action, Farhan going on a sleepy psycho rampage, the terrorists trying to escape, the SWAT team rushing in trying to catch up with sleepy psycho, and the mission control guys trying to figure out what all is happening.  And it is all done really well so you can keep track of everything, like when things are a little fuzzy and slowed down, you know that it is Farhan’s perspective, and that he is still super out of it.

So, Farhan catches up to top Big Bad Guy and shoots him pointblank.  Which is baaaaaaad.  Not, like, morally, but because they wanted to interrogate him and find his contact.  So, all the head cop guys are gathered around in a clear glass walled office in the middle of an empty room (why would you ever set up an office like that?  So much wasted space!) talking into a conference phone and trying to apologize and explain away the disaster.  As seems reasonable, they blame the whole thing on Farhan.  Oh, and also, we see in the background the fake sign/logo for their made-up anti-terror group and it looks SO FAKE.  Oh, and the subtitles are real messed up for this scene, they start before the dialogue and keep going after people have stopped speaking.

So, job lost, lead lost, everything horrible, Farhan goes to visit his daughter’s grave and dramatically pretend to shoot himself.  In the rain.  It’s just a bit much.  But he is interrupted, when headlights shine onto the grave.  He yells at the van that is outside the entrance to the cemetery to go away and turn out the lights.  Which is apparently enough to get it to back away.

The next day (maybe?  It’s lighter and the rain has stopped), Farhan walks out and finds a wallet by the gate.  He opens it and finds an address, where he presumably goes, and rings the door, just as the CUTEST little girl pops up next to him, all curly hair and glasses.  And then a bunch of other little kids show up too and all run inside when the housekeeper opens the door.  She invites Farhan in and says that “Panditji” has been waiting for him all day, asking “has someone come with my wallet yet, has someone come yet?”

Farhan goes through the house to a back room, and there is Amitabh!  In a wheelchair!  With really very well done fake stumps for his legs!

So, this brings me to a general comment.  Just based on the trailer, I was most interested in seeing the connection between Farhan and Amitabh.  Because, in real life, Amitabh is his “uncle”.  Farhan’s father, Javed Akhtar, wrote all of Amitabh’s greatest hits back in the day.  The kids ran in and out of each other’s houses, they spent holidays together, and so on and so forth.  Like Amitabh was with Indira Gandhi’s family.  So I wanted to see that real life comfort and love onscreen.  Aaaand, nothing!  There is nothing like that in this film!  I mean, the characters eventually build a relationship and all that, but it does not feel at all like their real life relationship.  I mentioned about the low box office, that part of the problem was that they were both great actors, but not stars, in this film, and an actor can’t give a movie a great opening, you need a star for that.  They really did disappear into their characters, like great actors do, and their real life connection was a casualty of that.  Oh, right, the leg stumps!  I noticed in Piku, and Amitabh talked about this a little as to why he liked doing Paa, that the extreme costume, props and make-up he used helped him to turn from AMITABH BACHCHAN into just the particular character.  And I think in this film, his glasses, his fake legs, and his terrible terrible wig perform the same function.  He really is Panditji, for the whole movie, until one moment right at the end when Amitabh peeks through.  I’ll let you know when that happens.  Oh, and I think Farhan uses his stupid cop mustache the same way.

(stupid cop mustache)

Right, so, Amitabh in a wheelchair teaches chess to small children, and says he taught Farhan’s daughter a couple of lessons, and she told him he should teach her father too.  He missed the funeral, so he went to the cemetery late last night to pay his respects, and caught Farhan’s embarrassing suicide attempt.  I find all of this very very convenient, and am immediately looking for the large scheme that Amitabh is clearly setting in motion.

So, then there’s a cut I don’t remember, and we see Farhan playing chess with a small child.  At first, it looks like he is remembering his daughter again, but then it pulls back, and he is playing with a little girl in Amitabh’s class.  And then there is a sequence of cute kids beating Farhan at chess.  It is adorable.  Finally, after a little girl lays some smack talk on him when she beats him in 3 minutes, Amitabh wheels over.  He looks at the board and gives wise and gentle advice, about how Farhan just has to see his mistakes, and go back, and do it over, correctly.

Montage of chess!  Is chess really this big a deal in India?  With the kids’ classes and the whole deal?  I know it is invented there and part of Indian culture and all that, but still!  Really?  At the end of the montage of chess between Farhan and Amitji, during which they are obviously getting closer and closer, Amitji asks Farhan how it felt to be able to kill the man who killed his daughter.  And explains that he wants to know how that feels, because the man who killed his daughter is still walking around.  Oh right, in that first scene Amitabh had mentioned that his daughter was also dead (and therefore building an immediate connection with Farhan), and said that she died falling down a flight of stairs.

But now, he tells the whole story!  His daughter was teaching the daughter of the Welfare Minister.  She fell down the stairs at his house.  And when Amitabh went to the house to see the body, he looked in the Welfare Minister’s eyes and saw that he had killed her.  But the cops don’t believe it, and no one is willing to go after the powerful politician.  Farhan, of course, is immediately all in.  Because Amitabh has played him like a fine violin to lead him right to this point.

Sardarji!  Farhan is still living with him, and he cooks!  While Sardarji moves around the kitchen, he gives Farhan the whole backstory.  Amitabh is a refugee from Kashmir (duh, his name is Panditji!) where his house was destroyed.  He came to Delhi with his wife and daughter, and a few years later his wife died in the same car accident that took his legs.  And then his daughter died.  The cops investigated thoroughly, and talked to the Welfare Minister and his daughter, and they both supported the fall down the stairs story.  All Farhan gets out of this is “His daughter was there that night?”

So, next step, Farhan is in the waiting room of a government office, asking to see the Welfare Minister, and using his cop title.  Only, awkward, the boss’s boss who was on that conference call and insisted he be put on sabbatical is also there!  Welfare Minister is super nice though, and insists he come in and sit down, and then suggests he be put back on the job, since he is clearly a superior cop.  Farhan holds firm though and says “That’s actually not what I came for, what can you tell me about Amitabh’s daughter?”  The other cops are all “faux pas!”  But the Welfare Minister is still super nice, and says it’s fine, he understands that they are close friends now, of course he would be curious, it is a sad thing, but the investigation is almost closed and it was just an accident.  And then he offers to shake his hand.  Don’t do it Farhan!  He is so clearly evil!

But he does it.  And then asks, “Before they destroyed your village, what were you?”  Minister says he was a wool weaver (seriously?  Most Kashmiri job ever!  I totally don’t believe him!).  Farhan doesn’t believe him either, and points out that his grip is pretty strong for someone who used to do such fine work.  To which Welfare Minister says “I play tennis.”  And it is supposed to be a super creepy threatening line, but, tennis?  It just doesn’t sound dark.

(Tennis!  We all think Amitabh was dying his hair in the 80s, right?)

 

So, Farhan gets yelled out on the way out and then gets drunk and wanders the street and “Tere Bin” starts up AGAIN.  It’s a great song, but this is a bit much.  Oh, and he wanders over to his house and stares at his wife as she refuses to answer his calls.  So, he’s depressed, is what I am saying.

So he goes over and knocks up Amitabh (knocks up in the awakening through knocking sense, not in the pregnancy sense).  Amitabh is pleased by this, pointing out that now they are true friends, since it is the first time Farhan did not call first.  He also offers to get drunk with him.  He has a very elaborate drunk system.  First, he puts on the classic film song that I don’t recognize which was his wife’s favorite (does anyone know what it is?).  Then, he pulls out a chess set which has each piece inside a shot glass, so you can take a shot every time you lose a piece.  So they get drunk and play chess.  And at the end of it, Farhan has won, but points out that he actually lost, since the point was to get drunk.  And then he talks about how much he loves his wife.  And Amitabh promises, he will get her back for him.  It’s sweet.  Except that it completely ignores a woman’s agency.  But still sweet!

So, now that they are even closer, Farhan is back in on investigating the Welfare Minister.  He shows up at a school and looks around at all the kids playing on the playground, then sort of sidles up to a little girl (not little-little, like 12) and casually asks her, without making eye contact, if she knows the Welfare Minister’s daughter?  He eases down on the other end of the bench where she is sitting and explains that his friend, Amitabh’s daughter, told him to look for the quietest girl on the playground and that would be her.  She sort of smiles at this.  Farhan is actually really good with little girls!  Let me check his real life kids real quick.  Yep, two daughters.  So, he starts sort of gently questioning her about Amitji’s daughter, and she is clearly scared and hiding something.  But before he can convince her to tell him, her nanny shows up and calls her away in a sort of stern manner.

While Farhan is keeping his promise to Amitji, Amitji is keeping his promise to him.  He is visiting Aditi.  So, Aditi in this, seems fine to me, but I asked my friend who saw her previously in London Paris New York how she is in general, and her response was “well, she has fewer lines in this, which makes it better.”  So apparently, not the greatest actress in general.  But in this, she is basically all silent reaction shots, so it doesn’t really matter.  So, in this scene, we get confirmation that their daughter actually did take lessons from Amitji, so I guess that wasn’t all a scam like I have suspected, and Aditi actually does know Amitji.  He asks her, as a personal favor, to help with the show that he is putting on in honor of his own dead daughter (because Aditi’s a dancer, remember that from like 45 minutes ago?).  She says no, and looks all sad and defeated and uninterested, and Amitabh takes a moment, and then launches into a great monologue.  He explains that both he and Aditi know the pain of losing a daughter, the never-ending torture of it.  But now, Aditi’s mother is feeling that pain also (Aditi’s Mom is sitting next to her on the couch), because she is seeing Aditi slip away into her depression.  So, if Aditi cares for her, she should try to save her from feeling this terrible pain, and force herself to go back to her own self.  It’s pretty sweet reasoning!

(Ali Zafar is so cute!  Only reason to see this movie.)

And, in a nice contrast, we go from this loving and caring version of parent-daughter relationships to one that is ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING.  Shy little daughter of Welfare Minister is sitting sketching on the floor of a room, when her father, her nanny, and a spooky bodyguard looking guy enter.  Her father sits down and quietly starts rolling up his sleeves.  It feels real creepy and potentially molesty.  But then all he says, in a super gentle voice, is that he’s heard she may have talked to someone at her school.  And she has to remember to be good, and keep her father’s secrets.  And, memory flash!  Of the Welfare Minister dressed in black with an machine gun shooting a bunch of people!  Okay, at this point, I totally figured out his whole backstory.  Like, so easily that I thought there was going to be another twist because it was so obvious from that flash.  The Welfare Minister was the terrorist who killed the village, he kidnapped this little girl and terrorised her into saying he was her father.  Doy!

And on to a totally unrelated scene!  Farhan is walking into an auditorium, having been called there by Amitji, when who should he see but Aditi!  Practicing “dance”!  I mean, all we have ever seen her do in this whole film is that spin and hands out and in move that Kathak dancers do, and nothing harder than that.  She sees him and looks all shocked and stops.  Amitji rolls forward and orders all the other dancers who are learning the spinny-hand thing from her to take a break.  And then he gives another looooooong speech.  I guess when you have Amitabh, you want to give him as many speeches as possible.  I mean, he nails them, and they are super touching, but if I am just recapping this sucker, I can boil them down real short.  Basic point of this speech, his wife died laughing and close to him, it was his fault (because he was speeding), and after she died, he and his daughter embraced each other and gathered strength from each other.  And then his daughter died, and he had no one to embrace.  You get it?  Farhan and Aditi?  Because you still have each other?

My main take-away from this scene, is that Farhan is SO SHORT.  It’s really nice framing, on three separate planes to symbolize how hard it is for them all to connect, with Amitabh in the wheelchair in the lower right corner, Aditi standing in the center to the left, and Farhan standing on the stage top center.  Only, I keep thinking “an apple box wouldn’t do it?  They actually need to put teeny-tiny little Farhan five feet above everybody else to make him not look teeny-tiny?”  Oh, and the sub-take away is that Amitabh’s wig is terrible!  There are a couple of close-ups where you can see the roots, and how they are sewn into the net.

(Either he’s shorter than I thought or Dips is taller)

And then we cut to Farhan in a boxing gym, which kind of feels like he heard my criticism and is trying to prove he is a manly man.  Anyway, he is just there for half a second to prove, yes, he still has that Bhaag Milkha Bhaag body, when his phone rings, and it is a friend giving him a heads up that the file on Amitabh’s daughter is about to be closed and he is freaking out in the police commissioner’s office.  How small a world is the Delhi police force?

(This body)

So, Farhan puts his shirt back on and rushes over to stop Amitabh, who is sort of flaying and yelling in the office.  And before Farhan pulls him out, he gets out one great line delivery, when he says “The only thing you changed in that file between now and when you opened it is to put one more DOT after your signature.”  Only the way he spits out DOT is just perfect.  So, yeah, Amitabh is upset.

And then we get a really great song sequence.  Another one!  The songs in this do a great job of explicating the characters motivations and all.  So, this one starts with Amitabh getting ready in the morning, buttoning his shirt, and then carefully putting on his jacket, and carefully pinning on an unusual pin thing on the lapel.  Which flashes back to him at his daughter’s death scene again, and stopping the coroners as she is wheeled away, for just one last stroke of her cheek.  Which knocks loose her earring.  Which he bends down and picks up, and then it fades into the present day where we see that he is wearing the earring on his lapel now.  He wheels out of the house and into his van.  He drives down the road and over to a Masjid.  I have a moment of concern that he is going to blow it up or something.  But it is nicer than that, it is just a moment of quiet peace and reflection at a worshipful space.  And this whole time, in the soundtrack, the “Maula” song is playing.  And then he drives his van to the side of the road and parks.  He wheels out, and sits in the middle of the road.  The music stops.  He pulls out a tape recorder and puts the headphones on his ears and hits play.  The music starts up again.  So clever!  You think it is a fantasy song, but it is actually diegetic.  Anyway, a motorcade starts coming towards him and the guards start moving forward to carry him out of the road.  The music is still playing, obviously he has it cranked up and can’t hear anything else.  The cars stop, and we see that the Welfare Minister is sitting in one of them.  His bodyguard gets out and encourages the cops to carry Amitji and his wheelchair out of the way.  As Amitabh is being carried, he opens the box that was sitting on his lap, and pulls out a clean, new shoe.  And throws it at the Minister’s car, knocking the light off the top.  And then sits back, satisfied.  It’s a really great sequence.

Followed by a not so great one.  Farhan wakes up, phone ringing, to hear a scream on the other end and then Amitabh’s housekeeper’s voice saying that he needs to come quick, Amitabh has been attacked!  Farhan rushes over (how close does he live?) to find Amitabh lightly stabbed, out of his wheelchair, being taken care of by the housekeeper.  What! Happened!

Neal Nitin Mukesh happened!  Amitabh explains to Farhan that he heard a noise and came downstairs to find Neal Nitin Mukesh, looking all crazy eyes and holding a hu-yuge knife!  He explains that he is there on behalf of the Welfare Minister as punishment for the shoe throwing.  He knocks Amitabh out of his wheelchair, stabs him lightly, then sets the wheelchair on fire by puncturing a small plastic bag of gas, then throwing it on the wheelchair, then setting the knife that has the residue of gas on it on fire, and throwing that onto the wheelchair, then yanking the knife back using the fishing line attached to it.  It is super cool and impractical.  And then, he finally introduces himself by his villain name, “Wazir”.  Which is apparently the chess term for the Queen piece in Hindi.

And……INTERVAL

And I am so taking a break and finishing the rest tomorrow, that was exhausting!  A lot more to this film than I thought, but still not enough to justify more than 2 parts.