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My Wife’s Murdergascar: (Definitely Not) A Review of Ramu Picture wallah’s latest fiasco

One of my quirks is an unconscionable tendency to deliberately mispronounce words, especially titles of movies and books, names of celebs, and even song lyrics.

I do this so routinely that at home they’re used to deciphering my weird mispronunciations.

So, for instance, to give you some recent examples, Parineeta becomes Perinatal, My Wife’s Murder becomes My Wife’s Mother (or even, obscurely, Mother-in-Law), Iqbal becomes Ek-ball, and so on.

Sometimes, I even combine these weird mispronuncations to come up with oddities like MyWife’sMurdergascar (a combo of My Wife’s Murder and Madagascar).

I’ve been doing this ever since I was a kid. It’s the way I think, that’s all. As people close to me know, I’ve always been a bit of a cartoon, constantly making ‘pjs’ and sometimes even ‘gj’s’ (good jokes!), and coming up with smart alecky thoughts that I sometimes voice aloud.

It’s like there’s a switch in my head that automatically flips the moment I hear something corny, and instantly I get a response.

Whether I choose to voice that response or not depends on the circumstances, or just on my mood. But I almost always get that
smart-alecky response.

At times, when it’s in full flow, I can watch a really awful movie–which is almost any Bollywood movie these days–and ‘dub’ the dialogue with my own running soundtrack.

Those who’ve had the dubious honour of being subjected to this aural torture by me have sometimes survived and laughed to tell the tale!

But mostly I just do it to get by, to deal with all the marketing shit
that TV channels, advertisers, movie studios, publishers, etc, throw at us every minute of every day.

To thumb a nose back at all that marketing muscle, and tell, them Ah, Go Brush Your Mother’s Teeth.

It’s my way of whistling in the wind.

Most recently, while watching My Wife’s Murder, I really wanted to do my ‘original soundtrack’ rendition.

The movie was that awful.

Now, you regular IE readers probably know by now that I actually like Ramu’s stuff a lot.

(That’s Ramu, short for Ram Gopal Varma, by the way, not Ramu Dosawalla, on Carter Road, Bandra, Bombay–although sometime I think Ramu Dosawalla makes better dosas than Ramu Picturewallah makes movies, but anyway…)

More than any individual movie (my fave RGV film is Ek Hasina Thi), I
like his attitude to Bollywood: Bakwaas bandh. Screw the songs, the sub-plots, the sidey character-plays, everything.

Just Tell The Story. Stylishly, elegantly, directly, brutally, simply. No naach-gaana (unless it’s a film about Naach-Gaana, and the distributors insist on naach-gaana).

If you want naach-gaana, you don’t go to see an RGV film, you go to a dance bar.

Or, since dance bars are closed now in Maharashtra, you go see a Karan Johar film instead.

Now, I know that MWM (My Wife’s Murder, or as I prefer to call it, My Wife’s Murdergascar) is not ‘really’ an RGV film.

In the sense that Ramu (picture wallah, not dosa walla) only produced the film, he didn’t direct it.

But then again, so many of RGV’s films are like that. I loved Ek Hasina Thi, which also he only produced.

I adored Ab Tak Chappan, Darna Mana Hai, and D, also ditto, ditto, ditto.

But MWM should have stayed unproduced, and undirected.

Actually, it was undirected, so what I mean is, it should have stayed unproduced.

Here’s the simple problem with the film: It doesn’t have a story.

You’ve seen the promos, you know more or less what the whole film is
about: A guy accidentally causes his wife’s death, then attempts to cover it up.

Now there’s a premise that could be developed into a full-length story, be it a novel, or a film.

Instead, it remains a premise. A premise with a promise. Which doesn’t deliver on that promise.

So the man gets nagged by the wife, loses his temper, slaps the wife, gets slapped back, and then she keels over, hits the bedstead and dies.

And then he tries to cover it up.

And he gets caught.

End of story, end of film.

Don’t worry, I didn’t spoil the suspense for you.

There is no suspense.

That’s the whole film.

He tries to cover it up, then gets caught.

Come on!

Now, if he got away with it, through an ingenious series of twists and turns, it would be a film.

If he fell into a vortex of ever-increasing complications, and then eventually, despite his best efforts, got caught, even that might work, although not as well. But it would be realistic and still interesting.

As it stands, though, it’s so simple, so one-line, it simply doesn’t work as a film.

See it for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s not about the realism. All RGV’s films are realistic. The mundane details are captured as convincingly as always.

But it’s the story that doesn’t go anywhere, like a car in first gear trying to accelerate to 80 kmph.

Even Anil Kapoor’s performance, sincere though it is, requires him to do little more than look harried and promote cigarette smoking for video editors like he’s being personally sponsored by ITC.

The only moment when he shines through is in the end, when he’s captured by the police, and shouts out an explanation to his kids–that’s the closest he comes to acting, as against endorsing cigarette smoking for editors who have accidentally killed their wives.

(Oddly enough, since the film is about a video editor, I actually happen to know the film’s editor, a very nice talented young guy named Ajoy Verma, and he actually does smoke–now I just hope he doesn’t have a wife who nags him, and that he doesn’t slap that wife, and then…)

I almost think that Ramu went to sleep during the script discussions of the film.

Me: “Bahut bheja khaya, Ramu-ji. Ab mere goli khaa!”

Me: “Bachh gaya saala!”

Anyway, coming back to the film, the only way I can deal with non-starters like that and still keep my sanity (which is already very shaky to begin with as is your’s, my neurotic reader) is to come up with alternate ways the film could have gone.

So, for instance, the Anil Kapoor character, instead of running off with his two little kids and subjecting them to all that stress and food poisoning and highway traffic, should simply have taken his
in-laws and run with them instead.

Then they could have even changed the title to My Wife’s Mother.

Had the ma-in-law nagging him. Then he gets mad and tells his wife to
tell her mother to stop nagging him.

So she says something stupid back to him. He slaps her (the wife). The
mother-in-law gets angry and slaps him.

Then he slaps her (the mother-in-law)!

The mother-in-law keels over, strikes her head on the edge of the bed, and falls down dead. (See, it even rhymes!)

Then he takes the wife and they both start running.

And the mother-in-law, now become a zombie, gets up, picks up the belan (dough-roller) in one hand, and the pressure cooker in the other hand (never know when you need rice as well as chapatis) and starts running after them.

In the end, she catches them, but only after tearing through a couple of dozen extras, causing major traffic jams, blowing up buildings, ripping through 16-ton trailer trucks (belans and pressure cookers make
a deadly combination) and generally causing mayhem throughout the city, sort of the way that the recent floods caused mayhem.

She catches them in the end, kills them both (she’s pissed off with the daughter now for not serving lunch on time) and then turns to the camera and says, in a perfect imitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger (but
an Indian Arnold), “Aah’ll be back!”

Now, that’s a film that even Ramu dosa walla could have liked.

In the end, though, My Wife’s Murder as it stands now, serves only as a feature-length promo for cigarette smoking, a doubtful promo for Onida TV (the TV is bekaar, but the box is useful to transport dead bodies), and cautionary tale about the hazards of being a video editor (boring job, nagging wife, assistant who doesn’t put out), as well as the risks of a live-in relationship, and lastly, police officers like eating biryani better than solving murders.

Oh, and there should be a statutory warning issued with all double beds too: CAUTION: FALLING HARD ON EDGE OF BED MAY CAUSE HEAD INJURIES AND BAD FILM SCRIPTS.

I also have a theory for why the film turned out to be such a disappointment: The director and the script writer were arguing about the script. The scriptwriter said something nasty, the director slapped him, the writer slapped him back, the director slapped him back harder…the writer slapped him yet again…and they’re still slapping each other somewhere for collaborating on this disaster of a film!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 11:06 am. It is filed under Ashok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.