Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota
Director: Vasan Bala
Year: 2018
Music: Karan Kulkarni; Dipanjan Guha
Duration: 134 minutes
Rating: 8.0
Aka The Man Who Feels no Pain
I need to start watching more recent Bollywood
films if this and Jagga Jasoos are to go by. There seems to be a new group
of young directors brought up on Western and Asian films, animation, video
games and MTV who are breaking with Bollywood film traditions and yet at
the same time retaining its spirit and heart. This one is fanciful, whimsical,
inventive and highly entertaining with an eccentric ever changing mix of
comedy, drama and kung fu. It is from a director (Vasan Bala) who had only
one film on his resume and he brings in two young actors with practically
no film experience. And makes it feels so fresh and so much fun.
That is true right from the opening scene
in which a group of men are rushing the hero of the film to beat the crap
out of him and he needs to explain to the audience just how this came about.
To do so he has to go back to his birth - well actually a few minutes before
his birth as his parents watch an action movie starring Anil Kapoor in a
movie theater. And so the story begins with the narrator telling his tale
with more than a few embellishments along the way - the Terminator tries
to kill his mother to stop his birth but she pulls out her guns and blasts
him away. He admits this probably didn't really happen. But it should have.
Surya (Abhimanyu Dasani) is born into the
world with no pain. He can't feel it. While being brought home from the hospital
in a motorcycle with a sidecar, thieves on another motorcycle snatch the
necklace of his mother and cause the transport to crash killing the mother
and sending the father, grandfather and baby crashing to the ground. The
baby just smiles. Pain teaches us as we grow up - not to touch a burning
stove, not to stick ourselves with sharp objects, not to jump off of high
places - but if you feel no pain those lessons are hard to come by as all
his broken bones can attest to.
Considered a freak by other kids, Surya
creates a bond with a Supri (Radhika Madan), a little girl with an abusive
father and they try and protect each other but eventually Surya's father
decides the boy needs to be isolated for his own safety. They move away where
with the advice of his grandfather (Mahesh Manjrekar) Surya dreams of becoming
a kung fu hero - after watching hundreds of videos of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan
- and saving the world from necklace snatchers. And in particular one video
in which a one-legged man beats 100 men in a fight impresses him - and the
video is pretty cool. One-Armed we know about, but one legged is even harder!
In a sense Surya never grows up - he is
a man-child with thoughts of wearing a mask and saving the day - and practices
kung fu from the movies obsessively. Finally, he ventures out into the real
world and comes across a woman who is beating the daylights out of a group
of men with her own martial arts. He falls in love on the spot. This of course
turns out to be his friend from childhood Supri, who learned her fighting
skills from . . . the one legged man (Gulshan Devaiah) who is now a sotted
drunk.
This all leads to a delightful story of
redemption, revenge and salvation among a series of bang bang fights that
are well choreographed and enjoyably exaggerated. I have no idea what the
real life martial skills of these actors are - but they do a fine job of
faking it here with some great athletic moves right out of Hong Kong. Though
the film never stops for a musical number, there is a constant series of
songs that play either in the background or over the story and they fit like
a glove. All of the actors are terrific - hopefully the young actors will
go on to some good films and the two veterans playing the grandfather and
the one legged man are great (he actually has a dual role as his no good
villain brother). I can't really pin it down but I have a feeling that this
director has seen Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle a few times but maybe not
- but they share the same anything goes spirit.