Ulajh Review: Diplomatic Doldrums

Ulajh strikes you as an attempt at statement-making gone horribly wrong, a punchline that doesn't land, a roar that never reaches the ear, observes Sreehari Nair.

In Sudhanshu Saria's Ulajh, Janhvi Kapoor plays a young woman who has to fight the rabid perception that she has landed a plum career assignment only because of her illustrious background.

She is Suhana Bhatia.

She hails from a family of high-ranking diplomats.

She is sent off as India's deputy high commissioner to the United Kingdom amid jeers, sneers and acid titters.

It's pretty evident that Janhvi Kapoor is trying to tell me something here.

Now, I am no committed detractor of Kapoor's.

If anything, I see her as something of an odd figure, in that she's a better actress than what her haters take her to be, but not quite as polished as her super-enthusiastic PR machinery would have you believe.

Kapoor may have given her best performance in the Zoya Akhtar section of Ghost Stories, where you felt she was allowed a free rein to bring her natural physical instincts to the role.

Ulajh, on the other hand, does not let her breathe.

In the course of the movie, Janhvi's character realises that she's being tailed, used, and made a pawn in a much bigger game of geopolitical chess -- in short, a scapegoat of scapegoats.

She contemplates suicide but shrinks away from the ledge.

Abused, and her voice throttled, she fights back.

She brings down a bunch of dangerous mercenaries and politicos.

She limps her way to the victory post.

She sends out the message loud and clear: she may be wet behind the ears, but when it comes to her job, she will duke it out and give it her all.

As a wink at Janhvi Kapoor's career graph, the narrative arc is just about interesting, but Ulajh lacks film sense, and lacks that zhuzh so essential to putting such a story over.

What it needed was a lead actress who, when pushed to the wall, could have brought some wit to her part.

But save a few intimations of how a once-bucktoothed girl might smile, and a passing moment where she says 'unofficial' with a slight slide of her eyeballs, Janhvi Kapoor is utterly flatfooted here.

 

In consequence, Sudhanshu Saria's film strikes you as an attempt at statement-making gone horribly wrong, a punchline that doesn't land, a roar that never reaches the ear.

In any film with true vision, you can detect an open approach to the movie frame: we keep taking things in, and the story gets told in the process.

In a movie like Ulajh, the details look carefully planted (everything from a child's birthday cake to a mole on someone's left cheek), so you never have to strain your attention, and you are never really invested in the goings-on.

There's no real momentum, only 'twists' of which there's one coming in every seven minutes.

A movie that rests on the strength of plot-based highs alone is in essence mugging the viewer but it's an even greater embarrassment when Sudhanshu Saria and his writers try to show us how hard they have worked to get the little things right.

The ambassadors and foreign service officials who populate Ulajh look like cutouts and behave like a fantasist's idea of how diplomats behave at cocktail parties.

When a certain diplomat talks in a foreign tongue, it sticks out like a bad hairstyle.

The gossip is flat.

The after-cocktail lovemaking becomes a matter of flashing one's dimples in fast cuts.

The nighttime scenes are so bursting with plot shifts that the daytime scenes had to be flaccid (most of them have Janhvi Kapoor running toward the camera in slow motion).

The geopolitical setting has been muddled up to such an extent that I started missing the whole 'Indians are good, Pakistanis are bad' line.

The actors are in on the mess, and that's hardly good news.

Meiyang Chang, who plays Suhana's professional bête noir in London, has the look of a confused moose that's also pretending to be angry.

Roshan Mathew hurls into the dead bureaucratic air everything he has -- sniggers, catchphrases silent threats, random splatterings of Malayalam -- and his outpourings land with the passion and intensity of a blown kiss.

Rajesh Tailang and Rajendra Gupta are so righteous and such softies that you cannot help but wonder if there's something the matter with them.

Everybody is out to needlessly thicken the gruel (seen this way, the movie lives up to its title), and even the honourable prime minister tries to pull a grand number over a phone-call... and gets away with it.

Adil Hussain plays it smart and refrains from wading too deep into the muck, and this feels like a virtuoso acting performance.

All things considered, perhaps the biggest undoing of the movie is that it wants to have it both ways.

Tough-mindedness and melodrama is a fatal combination, and Ulajh wishes to be a showcase for Suhana Bhatia's (and by extension, Janhvi Kapoor's) cunning and resourcefulness but without disturbing the morals of a paragon (some impasto of dark shade on the character would have made this tale a lot more bearable).

Sudhanshu Saria and his writers want to get us squarely on Suhana's side, while presenting her as a damsel in a dog-eat-dog world.

She may be sarcastic and biting one moment but she has to lapse into charitable largesse and thoughtfulness the very next.

She's so thoughtful that she even falls for Gulshan Devaiah's 'It's not easy being alone in a new city' drivel.

On the subject of Devaiah, he is cast here as Suhana Bhatia's nemesis-in-chief, and it's so far-off from the ambition he once suggested that it hurts.

There was a time when Gulshan Devaiah was going neck and neck with Nawazuddin Siddiqui in his attempt to bring to us the poetry that defines the Indian Weasel.

I am talking about a phase that included Shaitaan, That Girl in Yellow Boots, Peddlers and Hunterrr, when he was evoking on the big screen patterns of thought and speech that are indigenous to this country but which until then had been denied its artistic worth.

Nawazuddin, despite his spate of misfires, is still at it, but in Devaiah, one senses a drop in vitality, a conscious turn toward the pat and the tidy, as though he has been worked over by some life coach.

The direct result of his recent softening up is the part he is saddled with here, a part that feels like overcompensation from the get-go. He may be playing a cold-blooded chap, but to have Gulshan Devaiah portray a character with no human dimension whatsoever is a crime.

To top it all, he appears to be in love with his own voice.

One of Devaiah's great strengths has always been his ability to conduct his on-screen conversations as though they were happening on the wing.

Here, he talks and talks as if to himself, and drives us into such exhaustion that when Janhvi Kapoor asks him to shut up, she does us all a big favour.

Oddly enough, it's not the character's acts of villainy but the self-involved nature of the performance that makes you hate whoever it is that Devaiah is playing.

Just for the record, he has three names in the movie, not one of which stays with you.

When Gulshan Devaiah was pursuing the Indian Weasel, he was pursuing a type of character that had never before been given its due on the screen. And there he was, making it vivid. In Ulajh, he comes on as an evil windup toy, as a stock villain, and it's a blur.