'The Train' - a bogus ride on celluloid
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Film:
"The Train"; Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Sayali Bhagat, Geeta Basra and Aseem
Merchant; Director: Raksha Mistry and Hasnain Hyderabadwala; Rating: * Tagline
for this week's thriller - "Some lines should never be crossed". Sounds
familiar. Wasn't that the tagline for the 2005 cheesy downmarket
Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen starrer "Derailed"?
Co-directors
Mistry and Hyderabadwala, to whom goes the dubious distinction of being
the only directorial duo of Bollywood after Abbas-Mustan, don't just
rip off the fast-paced loco-motivated thriller about the price an
adulterous man must pay for biting into the forbidden fruit.
They
turn it into a mushy-mushy rush-rush job where the film editor seems as
much in a hurry as the commuters in the Thai subway that houses this
thriller's non-existent thrills.
Trust me, Geeta Basra playing
Aniston's role is quite a forbidden apple. She pouts, preens and poses
as though Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" has suddenly got too close
for comfort.
And Emraan Hashmi as Michael Douglas from "Fatal
Attraction" is a fatal aberration. Emraan's titillating transgressions
are the stuff that Mahesh Bhatt's cinema are made of. And yet here lies
the deception - the very idea of placing Emraan at the vortex of a
lustful infidelity is not temptation enough to sit through this stilted
rip-off of a passably puerile thriller.
It's one thing for Shekhar Kapur to sublimate "Man Woman & Child" by making it into the resplendently emotional "Masoom".
Mistry
and Hydrabadwala heat up the cold warmth of the Hollywood film into a
mockery of all definitions of life, love marriage and lust in cinema.
The
Thai setting hardly helps to pump up the anaemic adrenaline. It only
heightens the queasy feeling of watching a bad Hollywood thriller
vandalised by people who don't seem to have one original, let alone
inspiring, bone in their creative body.
In the absence of an
inner conviction, the narrative creates scenes from a broken marriage
whose splinters pierce the plot with agonising self-consciousness.
K.
Raj Kumar wields the camera as though Bangkok was an overgrown shopping
mall. The film wears an over-ripened decadent look suggesting forbidden
pleasures.
Yes, Mithoon's tunes are interesting in bits. Why not watch them at home?
If
you really want to know why modern marriages are falling apart, don't
look for answers in this unfaithful adaptation of a foreign film on
unfaithfulness. Watch Anurag Basu's "Metro" instead. But if you really
want to know what's wrong with Hollywood rip-off-ed Hindi films, go see
"The Train".
A more bogus ride on celluloid would be difficult to obtain.
By Subhash K. Jha, Indo-Asian News Service
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