Madhur Bhandarkar’s Corporate strives to go behind the sins of boardrooms, a rarely touched upon subject unless you count Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug.
Corporate
Cast: Bipasha Basu, Kay Kay Menon
Direction: Madhur Bhandarkar
Rating: **
Hop right over to a loaded laptop. While a company executive gently sleeps in a 50-star hotel room, his ladyfriend of the night lights up a cigarette. She’s about to co-hack an ultra-secret formula for a new mint-based fizzy. Dizzy?
Quite. Madhur Bhandarkar’s Corporate strives to go behind the sins of business boardrooms, a rarely touched upon subject unless you count Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug (1981). Anyway, so has Bhandarkar been able to pull off the fizzical act? Not quite.
Because of the excessive use of cliches (a minister salivating over crores of rupiyas and wannabe Neha Dhupias), technical sloppiness (tacky transition shots of a skyscraper office), seedy visual styling (flower bouquets to add colour to a frame).
And an ensemble of characters which is either cawingly crow black or prettily polar bear white. Hey, whatever happened to pigeon grey?
On the upside, some valid issues are addressed like the sale of pesticide infested soft drinks, the arm twisting by foreign investors, bids to influence business award juries and the poaching of human resources by competing companies.
Snag: such reality-based comments are outnumbered by the patented Bhandarkarisms. It’s bludgeoned into your marshmallow soft head that business barons, licence-dispensing politicians (including a wavy-haired Finance Minister in Delhi), and the often “pimping” media (Lillete Dubey, TV Anchor), are all bad, bad, BAD. Please, tell us another.
Or at least make your opinions engrossing. However, much tedious food-age is expended over intrigues about grabbing the bulk of the fried-potatoes-cool-drink market. In this diet-challegenged ambience, the camera snuggles upto a chic-fit executive (Bipasha Basu). She’s nice spice, striking deals faster than travelling up and down a paisley patterned elevator.
Spicewoman has recuperated from a broken marriage and is madly in love with a London-returned guy (Kay Kay Menon, vapidly disappointing). Now now, the Hounslow honcho may be the bossman’s bro-in-law but he’s also a colabiz loser. Tsk.
Actually, this couple is goody good, often welling over with the poopsie of human kindness. Lovely.
Mucho musibat ahead. Their boss (Rajat Kapur) will save his own skin when the potato chips are down.Aaloo gale lag jaa?
Next: the adversaries led by an expressionless wonder (Raj Babbar) move in for the kill.And Ms Spice and Mr London become bore-again versions of Laila-Majnu.Oooh. Really by now, you’re ready to drown your sorrows in a Boozeleri bottle.
Message: whenever you gulp a soft drink, remember that a lot of blood, sweat and item girls have gone in there.
On the techfront, neither the cinematography nor the set décor and editing are worth raving about. The sing-a-long factor is remarkable only for the zingy O Sikander. Raju Singh’s background music score, lapsing into Gregorian chants, is gigglesome. So is that mandatory homophopic aside dawdling over a gay film director.
Manoj Tyagi’s dialogue veers avoidably towards Hinglish, yielding such nuggets as, “You have to think from up there (the head), not from down there (yikes).” The bitching office clerks and security guards are a stale re-run of the gossiping chauffeurs from Page 3. Bas kya?
Of the cast, Minisha Lamba and Sameer Dattani are junior artistes. The surprise packet is Sandeep Mehta, who is absolutely brilliant and believable, as a sexed-up executive. Vinay Apte as the stereotyped creepy politician is a relief from the overused Govind Namdeo and Mohan Joshi.
Evidently with experience, Bipasha Basu has learnt the alphabet of acting. She’s singularly sustained, sassy, well groomed and lifelike. The rest of Corporate isn’t.
khalid@dnaindia.net
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