Apricot Season

Bollywood rarely gives encouragement to social causes – hundreds of chronic injustices are ignored by India’s most powerful public medium and its most emulated public figures. So Rajkumar Santoshi, in Halla Bol, has decided to take cognizance of all of them in one go, while also taking a long, introspective look at his industry’s conspiracy of cheerful silence. But the road to movie hell is paved with good politics, and Halla Bol is so breathless with righteousness that it ends up not speaking to the audience at all.

Ashfaque Khan (Ajay Devgan) is an idealistic actor in a street-play troupe led by Sidhu (Pankaj Kapur). Sidhu despatches him to Bombay, where naturally he becomes Bollywood’s biggest star. He changes his name to Sameer Khan (which sounds an awful lot like Amir Khan, especially when shouted by an angry mob). Sameer’s success saps his idealism and he wretchedly turns his back on the good fight, until, one night at a club, he becomes witness to murder. Two papa-minister-hain-types shoot a young woman, who is basically Jessica Lall. Sameer must wrestle with his conscience about testifying in court. When he does, he faces the wrath of the minister (played with irritating hysteria by Darshan Jariwala) and in turn becomes the victim who nobody will help.

The central question of Halla Bol is why real celebrities never stick their necks out, or as Sidhu puts it, why they open their mouths as wide as they can to endorse a product, but dont move their lips for a social issue (Ajay Devagan being the perfect example). It’s a good question and the film asks it well. The film then ventures into the question of why, more generally, none of the rest of us do either. This is its downfall. Once Sameer’s luck fails, he gets dragged over every social issue from communal politics to the casting couch, past echoes of Zaheera Sheikh, of Fanaa, and random characters shouting about the Right to Information. This is like being spoon-fed a cold, bland porridge of boiled newspaper. For instance, Santoshi keeps plugging religious harmony in a story that has nothing to do with it, culminating in a farcical speech where Sameer chides Muslim leaders for exploiting minority politics even though their country’s President is Abdul Kalam.

After dwelling pointlessly on the Bollywood phase, the script has to rush through this politically correct wilderness, frequently losing itself on the way. The music and the dialogue fall flat. There are some powerful shock-moments, like the climactic scene when Sameer returns to the street-play format in a final bid for justice: gasping for coherence and poignancy, the movie turns back to Safdar Hashmi’s life. It uses his horrific end for a brief cinematic boost, then resumes its own haphazard style of convincing the audience to rise up. They did, and left.