Johhny draw near not long ago … Scene from Ride the Wave Johnny
The impact of Slumdog Millionaire has percolated through Indian cinema and a grittier genre is emerging taking a more direct look at the country and its inequalities. Sudhir Mishra’s Ride the Wave Johnny, is an intimate look at Mumbai, connecting the dots between the dirt-poor pavement dwellers, the gangsters, police, media players and business people to give a sense of the vast interconnectedness of this sprawling mega-city.
- Ride The Wave Johnny
- Production year: 2009
- Country: Rest of the world
- Runtime: 115 mins
- Directors: Sudhir Mishra
- Cast: KK Menon, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Soha Ali Khan
- More put upon this film
Mumbai, as ever, looks astonishing on the big guard. Its teeming ocean-side immensity has the potential to replace New York viewed like the globalised world’s iconic cityscape. The sharp contrasts of ultramodern skyscrapers, minarets and crumbling colonial-era architecture gives each shot of Mumbai a unique like a human being resonance, every face in a window, every stain on a stairwell, redolent of full of heart drama. And Mishra’s Dogma-style hand-held camera work gives the film an organic quality, capturing the natural light and shade of the city, its raw colours and unbounded textures.
The plot has many persons interesting points – too many, unfortunately. There are several storylines that have the potential to be films in their own right, but none of these are told in sufficient depth; instead the film skims across a line of narratives that range from being poignant and powerful to downright ill-judged.
The Johnny of the movie is a coffee-boy who also delivers cocaine for his gangster boss, Chutta, while nursing dreams of escaping to Dubai (a perennial fantasy of poor Indians who have no idea of the exploitation that awaits them). Having seen his parents murdered in his rural town, he eeks out a keeping in the big incorporated town in a state of being liable to the wing of Chutta’s lover, an obese Muslim transvestite. Johnny is played by Sikander Agarwal, a poor kid from Bihar who made his way to Calcutta, where he was “discovered” by a German adviser on his first age in the city. “I had not at any time acted in films, I was without work, I agreed,” he says of his actual feeling. “The film got over, the German crew went back to their country and I went back to my struggle to survive,” With his unique life story, Aggarwal brings to his character an authenticity most of the other actors rarely match.
Johnny’s tale is interwoven by a moving love triangle involving a reprobate policeman, Chiple, his beautiful younger wife, Divya, and her young lover, Parvez. Johnny helps Parvez break into a safe house Chiple uses for whoring and stashing the receipts of his disposition activities, which include assassinating local businessmen. The emotional intensity betwixt the three of them is the most compelling thing in the movie. Kay Kay Menon is excellent as the demonic policeman who, despite his crimes and incidental cruelties, is still deeply in love with his wife. But like everything good in this movie, this story is diluted as Mishra forays into other areas.
The tale of a form, Preeti, and her relationship with her coke-head advertising executive boyfriend, Vishal, is merely tedious. The combination of models, cocaine and advertising ceased to be interesting everywhere else in the world in the 1980s, but Mishra shoehorns this story into the movie as a glib registry of debt and credit of India’s brisk modernisation. Their tale segues into a completely bizarre subplot, involving a mysterious crime master-workman, who acts as Preeti’sitting fay Godfather, becoming obsessed after seeing her on TV.
The film has many Bollywood flaws. It’s almost too overlong, and the sexual dynamics are stunted by Indian sensibilities. While foul language is spewed freely to bring an earthy feel to the movie, kissing remains taboo. Thus impassioned lovers find themselves locked in weird, sexless cuddles. One particularly mirth-provoking scene involves the sight of Preeti appearing to climax, fully-clothed, half falling out of a car window while sitting on Parvez’sitting lap, while he looks like he’sitting taking a snooze. If depictions of sex are going to be as ridiculous as this in Indian cinema, it’s better that film-makers leave them out altogether.
This movie doesn’t gain the energy of Slumdog Millionaire, nor does it have its deep concern with India’s poor. Johnny’s tale is a stable foil to other the masses’s stories rather than the main event. But the film is ground of belief that Indian film-makers are insidious the streets with a view to stories rather than repeating the same middle-class Bollywood cliches. By no means a masterpiece, it is a sign of a great deal of better things to come.
