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 Comedy

SATRU GATE

CAST: Madan Krishna Shrestha, Hari Bansha Acharya, Deepak Raj Giri, Deepa Shree Niraula, Paul Shah, Anchal Sharma, Priyanka Karki

DIRECTION: Pradip Bhattarai

 Next-door neighbors Suraj (Paul Shah) and Sandhya (Anchal Sharma) are lovers and are destined to get hitched soon. The two families are preparing for the wedding but Suraj’s father (Hari Bansha Acharya) is still apprehen­sive about getting his son married to the daughter of his sworn enemy, a corrupt politician played by Ramesh Ranjan. He tries to reason with his wife (Deepashree Niraula) and son to back out. But what is a loving father to do when his son’s adamant to marry the girl of his choice? The opening 15 minutes of ‘Satru Gate’ set it up as a regular ‘slice of life’ centered on a big, fat Nepali wedding. But hang on! Director Pradip Bhattarai and his co-writer Deepak Raj Giri aren’t here to offer you a sober family entertainer. Their aim is rather to stretch the comedy to the extreme and push the story forcefully to a chaotic route. They model their film as a South Indian masala entertainer, piling it with multiple sub-plots driven by illogical twists every 15 minutes or so.

The movie moves at lightning speed. In this family mix, out of nowhere, a tantric baba is thrown in. He demands Suraj and Sandhya’s matrimony be stopped as their alli­ance will anger the holy spirits. Then a troublemaker Rahul (Deepak Raj Giri) moves into the neighborhood. He happens to be a YouTube vlog­ger who upsets the neighborhood’s harmony by spying on his neighbors to create sensational content for his YouTube channel.

One of his stunts goes too far, jeop­ardizing Suraj and Sandhya’s wed­ding and creating a feud between their families. After that Satru Gate shows no trace of being a wedding movie and ventures into a battle of wits between the characters of Hari Bansha Acharya character and Deepak Raj Giri. A few more eye-roll inducing plot twists later, the film shifts from Kathmandu to Tarai where Sandhya’s made to marry someone else while Suraj and his father decide to crash her wedding to rescue her. But until that point, keeping track of the story becomes a tedious chore.

Heavyweight comedians Acharya and Giri disappoint as they rarely come out of their comfort zone. Acharya does what he does best, playing a clownish man-child. He approaches this role by only slightly twisting his Hari Bahadur character that he has immortalized over the years. Similarly, Giri swaggers back to the cool-dude baddie he played in both installments of ‘Chakka Panja’. The two overshadow the youngsters Paul Shah and Anchal Sharma. It feels like the two are doing extended cameos in a movie that begins with them as protagonists.

This is director Bhattarai’s follow up to 2016’s ‘Jatra’. While he was successful in weaving together three distinct characters to blend a coher­ent story in ‘Jatra’, he’s weighed down by the massive cast and nev­er-ending sub-plots in Satru Gate. He flips from one scene to another as if he is a guide who wants to give his audience the tour of the entire world in just two hours. This is mentally draining on the audience.

Laughs in the movie mostly come from cheap digs at some­one’s appearance or misogynistic one-liners. It is ironic that after all the randomness and lapse of logic, the movie wants to ends as a socially aware work celebrating Nepal’s cul­tural diversity.

Satru Gate was not made with the audience’s intelligence in mind. It was made solely as a vanity proj­ect for Hari Bansha Acharya and Deepak Raj Giri to shoehorn their old-school comic sensibilities into a money-spinning masala movie.

2 stars **

SHORT STORIES

Men without Women

Haruki Murakami

Published: August 2017

Publisher: Random House UK

Pages : 240 pages (hardcover)

Haruki Murakami, as the master of strangeness and surrealism, might more than occasionally leave us confused by blurring the lines between reality and dreams in his stories. But the seemingly connected tales in this recent collection of short stories, ‘Men Without Women’, Murakami’s first in more than a decade, feel a lot more developed and realistic compared to the surreal stories in Murakami’s 2006 collection ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’. In ‘Men Without Women’, as his characters try to grapple with the fact that they are alone, Murakami, for the first time, doesn’t roman­ticize the concept of being lonely. Instead, the stories are about love, loss, and pain—the very elements that are the driving forces of life. And though it feels un-Murakami like, it’s a refreshing change for those who have had a little too much of the writer’s obsessions with jazz, whiskey drinkers at bars, and van­ishing cats—though there are hints of these in ‘Men Without Women’ too.

Most of the middle-aged men in these seven tales, four of which have been previously published, have lost the women in their lives—to other men or death, and they are thus lonely.

This puts them in a situation Murakami terms ‘Men Without Women’. Though the stories are essentially about men and nar­rated by men, women hold an important place in each of the tales, even though they remain somewhat mysterious.

In the first story, an actor, whose wife has died, hires a young woman driver to take him to the theater and bring him back home. During the commute, he talks about how he was always faithful to his wife, even though she had many lovers. He even confesses that he took to meet­ing one of them at bars to talk about her and somehow get his revenge but, in the end, manages to rise above it.

There is another story where a housewife visits a man at his retire­ment home to bring his groceries and then they have sex, following which she tells him bizarre sto­ries. Then there is an unmarried 50-something plastic surgeon with a long list of girlfriends with whom he enjoys wine, conversation, and sex, ‘a discreet pleasure but never the goal’, until he falls hopelessly in love with one of them.

In yet another story, a man gets a call at one in the morning from the husband of a former girlfriend, whom he has not been in touch with for years, to tell him she has commit­ted suicide.

Studies say loneliness can be lethal. In ‘Men without Women’ it is said to be deep-seated like ‘a red wine stain on a pastel carpet’. And while that might be true, the varied ways in which the characters in the stories deal with it make you realize that, while loneliness is at the crux of our existence and there is no escaping it, we will all eventually find a way to embrace it.

‘Raid’, the latest Ajay Devgn star vehicle, is set during the 1980s and follows the exploits of an honest to a T income tax offi­cer, played by Devgn, to bring down a corrupt demigod politician. The film wastes no time in paint­ing Devgn’s Amay Patnaik as an incorruptible, saint of a man. In his first scene, we see him saunter into a country club. The guards won’t allow him in because he’s wearing sandals. In a normal situation, a per­son would fuss with the guards but not Patnaik. He instead appreciates that the guards are following the rulebook, and nobody’s above the rules. The entire movie from then on is an elaboration on Patnaik’s by-the-book approach to everything.

Drama/Thriller

RAID

CAST: Ajay Devgn, Saurabh Shukla, Ileana D’Cruz

DIRECTION: Raj Kumar Gupta

Patnaik has recently shifted to Lucknow with his wife (Ileana D’Cruz) to assume the local office of office the Internal Revenue Ser­vice. He’s a strict task master and always urging his junior officers to wage a crusade on tax evaders and money launderers. At home, he shares a sound relationship with his wife. They don’t fight, don’t argue but give positive feedback to each other. He compliments her for tag­ging along with a government ser­vant whose honesty always leads to abrupt transfers. She compliments him for his uprightness. Their talks are unbelievably sober and refined, given that he’s the kind of husband who’s rarely at home, and she’s the kind of wife who spends her dull afternoon at the verandah waiting for him. Like Patnaik’s saintly image, this relationship feels too idealistic and far-fetched.

The movie picks some momentum when Patnaik starts getting anony­mous tip-offs that direct him to Tauji (played by Saurabh Shukla), an influ­ential local parliamentary leader who enjoys a reputation as the dis­trict’s guardian. Patnaik leads a huge raid party to Tauji’s residence—‘The White House’—in search of InRs 420 crore worth of unaccounted wealth.

Director Raj Kumar Gupta loosely bases the story on the “longest income tax raid” carried out in Luc­know in the 1980s. The premise sounds interesting. But Gupta, who has previously directed ‘Aamir’, ‘No One Killed Jessica’ and ‘Ghanchak­kar’, settles for a more mainstream and dialogue heavy treatment this time. In his previous films, Gupta left things open-ended, without resorting to simplistic resolutions. One can speculate that because his last two films, except ‘No One Killed Jessica’, were box-office bombs, he this time wanted a crowd-pleaser with a dependable Bollywood star. In ‘Raid’ he is least bothered about breaking the film’s tempo: he sneaks in ill-timed songs and makes wild detours.

It’s a challenge to keep the audi­ence hooked to a single location for long, and Gupta and his screen­writer Ritesh Shah lose steam by the middle of the film. Though sup­porting characters—especially the ageing and wisecracking Maaji, the grandmother of Tauji household—provide some comic relief, the story has no interesting twists to break the drudgery.

Hardcore Ajay Devgn fans who like a brooding hero could find ‘Raid’ a passable companion piece to his ear­lier works like ‘Singham’, ‘Drishyam’ and ‘Gangajal’. But for the rest, it’s just Devgn on autopilot.

2 AND A HALF STARS

Wicked Spoon Fork & Rock, as the name sug­gests, is all about great food and good music. Located conveniently opposite the parking lot behind St. Mary’s School in Jhamsikhel, right next to the famous Roadhouse Café, Wicked Spoon is a popular venue for live music in the area.

With a dedicated stage complete with sound and lights, this live music venue fea­tures band and artists of different genres every weekend. From rock, blues and pop to contemporary and jazz, Wicked Spoon serves a variety of music combined with an elaborate multi-cuisine food menu. Combine that with the flaming bartenders mixing a delectable list of cocktails and you’re in for a treat.

THE MENU

Chef’s Special:

Beer Battered Fish and Chips

Lemon Chicken

Wicked Crispy Chicken

Opening hours: 10:00 am-10:00 pm

For reservations: 01-5522968

Cards: Not Accepted

Average meal for two: Rs 1,500 (including starters & main course)