Good, bad and ugly

Naseeruddin Shah's directorial debut is a well-made film that gets its ending badly wrong. And a sneak peek at some other films screened at this year's Osian-Cinefan festival.

Each year, the Osian-Cinefan film festival in Delhi has a "centrepiece" screening, usually scheduled for the festival's mid-point.

Enormous crowds show up, there is much sweating and swearing and jostling outside the large wooden doors of the Siri Fort foyer, and panic-stricken moments ensue both for security and for the pampered journalists and delegates who are already inside, wondering if a life-threatening stampede is on the cards.

Last year's centrepiece was Satyajit Ray's gentle masterwork Pather Panchali. This year was the world premiere of Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota (What If....?), Naseeruddin Shah's first film as director, a smartly made movie that, in parallel narrative strands, tells the stories of: a newly married couple (played by Konkana Sen Sharma and Jimmy Shergill) who must briefly be separated because he's working in the US; a small-time organiser of foreign shows (Paresh Rawal) taking money from young girls to get them to the US; a brilliant but poor student who secures admission to a university abroad; and a crooked stockbroker (Irrfan) who is falsely implicated in a murder.

Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota is advertised as a film about "people with distinct hopes and motives whom fate has randomly selected to play their assigned roles in one of the most terrible events of recent times".

Revealing that the terrible event in question is 9/11 should really not be a spoiler for anyone, considering the visual and verbal clues Shah puts into the film "" right from the prolonged dateline at the beginning that says "August 31, 2001". (This is immediately followed by talk about a US visa, and about sundry characters who are leaving for America. A girl excitedly holds up a US tourism brochure with the twin towers on them. "Skyscrapers don't even make good ruins," a man says sagely at one point, extolling the virtues of modest dwellings. Halfway through the film, there is a pre-figuring shot of a plane flying high above a skyscraper.)

For most of its duration, this is a more than competent film, especially for a debutant director. Shah juggles the narratives with aplomb, most of the characters are well-delineated, always a difficult achievement in a film like this (though the mad family Konkana Sen Sharma's character marries into could have come out of a particularly distressed David Lynch film), and the script is good, if a little stilted in places.

Unfortunately, the film's impact is diluted by a much too explicit and expository ending. One understands what Shah is trying to do here: he's making a statement on the quirks of destiny by presenting the minutiae of various lives that will be impacted by a terrible real-life incident we already know about.

The concept is undeniably interesting; it would doubtless be possible to make hundreds of films about the people whose hopes and dreams were altered or destroyed by 9/11.

But there's also an element of tastelessness in taking an enormous tragedy, the scars of which are still fresh in the minds of those affected, and stylising it the way this film does in its final 10 minutes. (I'll avoid revealing too much "" except to say that there's a scene with one of the characters in a room on the 95th floor of the WTC, watching the aircraft hurtle towards him!)

Take away those final 10 minutes, however, and Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota is an engaging film with a lot going for it by way of script and performances. It might be worth waiting to see what Shah the director does next. Meanwhile, here are some other Cinefan films that you might soon get to see at your neighbourhood multiplex:

DOSAR
A young housewife, Kaberi (an excellent performance by Konkana Sen Sharma) learns that her husband has been in a near-fatal car accident but also simultaneously discovers that he was having an affair with a married colleague.

Her immediate reaction is that of extreme hurt disguised as vehemence, even callousness: she refuses to sign documents at the hospital, lashes out at her husband's brother, makes sarcastic remarks at inappropriate moments, takes morbid pleasure in informing her injured husband that his ex-lover died in the crash.

But after the initial shock she tries to get down to the business of carrying on with her life. Fine human drama by Rituparno Ghosh, shot in beautiful black and white.

AMERICAN BLEND
"This is a story about the integration of cultures," says director Varun Khanna. American Blend is music-and-dance celebration of a cross-cultural, part-Indian part-American family living in Los Angeles.

Raj Chadha (Anupam Kher) runs a restaurant called Bollywood Cafe. His wife, Jayme (Dee Wallace-Stone) is American and there's a secret threatening the family bond. Incidentally, this is one of the first films by an Indian director to have been made under the rules of the American Screen Actors' Guild.

IT COULD BE YOU
Naseeruddin Shah has been ubiquitous at this year's edition of the festival. In this film by Taranjeet Singh, he plays Dhillon, a middle-aged baggage-handler at Heathrow airport, whose life changes when he wins a £10 million lottery.

But this film never hits even a minor-league jackpot itself; it's full of the most annoying cliches about NRI life, beginning with a contrived (and inconsistent) accent by Kirron Kher as Mrs Dhillon. It meanders from unfunny slapstick comedy to unintentionally funny morality tale about the relative importance of family and money, to an inept hired-killer yarn.