Broken horses: Lost in translation

April 11, 2015 07:58 pm | Updated 07:58 pm IST

12CP_Brokenhorses

12CP_Brokenhorses

All great cinema (and, indeed, all great art) is, at its core, a mastery of the cultural idiom. It’s not easy to define precisely what it is that characterises it, but the absence of it shows up glaringly like an ill-fitting suit or a mangled metaphor. When in his cinematic comfort zone (in Bollywood), director Vidhu Vinod Chopra has offered us many entertaining movies and introduced us to memorable (even if quirky) on-film characters. It also helped that in Bollywood, audiences are arguably a little more forgiving of contrived tearjerker plots or even the strained unfunny humour of, say, Johnny Lever. Because, of course, that’s who we are — or should I say: “we are like that only”.

Broken HorsesGenre: Action Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra Cast: Anton Yelchin, Chris Marquette, Vincent D’Onofrio, Maria Valverde Storyline: Two brothers are caught up in the quicksand of organised crime in the badlands of Texas

Thus, for instance, even those of us who found Nana Patekar’s histrionics as the pyrophobic crime lord Anna in Parinda (one of Chopra’s earliest masterpieces) a trifle over-the-top were in thrall of the raw emotion that the actor channelled. But the bhel puri that’s a best-seller in Bandra may not go down so well in the badlands of the Tex-Mex border. Broken Horses , Chopra’s crossover film (and a broad-brush repackaging of Parinda for a Western audience), fails because it feels like a Hollywood film made largely with a Bollywood aesthetic. It has all the elements of a potboiler — action, raw emotion, bhai-bhai bromance (without the ‘Yaadon ki Baaraat’ song!) — and even some quirky cinematography. But all of this just doesn’t come together because Chopra is clearly not a master of the Western cultural idiom.

And it shows in just about everything. The delineation of the lead characters is rather weak and simplistic, for which Chopra overcompensates with mush and melodrama, leaving them to play B-grade caricatures of themselves. The screenplay is somewhat stilted: everyone thinks of everyone else as “a baaaad man” (the effect of those words, when stretched from here to eternity by a Texan drawl, is comical in the extreme). And the repackaged plotline appears to have been stuck together with bubblegum and tied up with string. Chopra appears not to have cared overmuch to plug the many holes in it. It reflects a peculiar ‘jugaad’ attitude that I guess success in Bollywood blinds you to.

Broken Horses is, in the end, a ‘vada-pav Western’, a chewy, inedible one at that. It’s as if Vidhu Vinod Chopra boarded a flight from Bollywood to Hollywood, but his plane went missing somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle of maudlin melodrama, stilted screenplay, and a storyline with gaping holes.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.