Review: Rocket Singh, Salesman of the Year
When I first put Rocket Singh in my Netflix queue a couple of months ago, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The bag of reviews was mixed; some said it tried too hard to be offbeat, others said it didn’t try hard enough, some said it was boring, others said it was the best, under-rated film of the year, etc. etc. It wasn’t bad at all, even though it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be.
It stars Ranbir Kapoor as Harpreet Singh Bedi, a young man who barely passes his B.A. exam but is eager to try his luck at the one thing he is good at – making a sales pitch. He lives with his grandfather (a wonderful Prem Chopra, who is enjoying quite the comeback after years of being the snazzy ’70s villain), hangs out with some friends, and applies for a salesman’s job in a company of assembled computers. His eagerness and quick thinking get him the break, but equally quick thinking when faced with a moral dilemma lands him in hot water. He realises that making it in the cutthroat world of sales requires more than smooth talking – there are other kinds of grease that are important to closing deals, and his new boss humiliates him for his stupidity and naivete when faced with a corrupt client. In the doghouse, attacked by jeering colleagues with paper rockets, he fumes and swallows his rage, and then slowly and quietly rebels – he creates a rebel sales organisation within the one he works for, a company that practises all the ideals that his rotten company has eschewed: customer service, deliveries on time, etc. Not surprisingly, a period of dizzying success is followed by dramatic exposure, and then the final confrontation and denouement.
A lot of good, offbeat Hindi films start off very well, many hold their steam for a good bit of the narrative, but very few end well. I don’t mean a happy ending, obviously, I mean the ability to bring the story to an efficient and elegant close. Most go on for too long – this one is rather insipid after the neat buildup. It’s very bare bones throughout, relying entirely on the script and very quick, idiomatic dialogue to carry it through, and that itself makes it totally worth watching. It’s very funny, with some moments of sheer genius – like the one where Harpreet’s immediate boss warns him never to write his real name and affiliation in a company’s visitors’ roster, to avoid the snooping competition. He points to a name on the list – “Vijay Dinanath Chauhan” – and Harpreet nods, his eyes widening in comprehension. A rival salesman has tried to disguise himself and play a trick on his competition by signing his name as the don Amitabh played in Agneepath, but we are left to work that out; it’s to Shimit Amin’s credit that he doesn’t hit us on the head with that joke.
For the most part, I like this genre that is more about dwelling on these everyday conversations, lives and spaces than about a plot or a message. A lot of reviewers don’t quite seem to know what to do with these films – they are clearly not the song-and-dance extravaganzas, the We-All-Live-in-the-West hip romances, the gritty, gangster bloodbaths or serious art-house cinema. A lot of them – Khosla ka Ghosla, anyone? – are simply about bringing a particular neighbourhood slice to life. They are the successors to the Sai Paranjpye movies of the ’80s like Katha or Saeed Mirza’s Nukkad, of course with a lot less political bite than the latter’s films. And their joy is in getting the little things right and striking a chord with anyone who’s ever been in these environs. The office ‘get-together’ in Rocket Singh is cringe-worthy and absolutely spot on, right down to the moment where the songs change and everyone collectively stops dancing just for a second, and then goes yaayyyyy as another favourite film number comes on. It’s all about etching the silliness and pettiness of these moments, and the body language and everyday accents of the characters – grandpa’s Punjabi, the techie’s Dakhni, the peon’s Shuddhh Hindi – rather than any deep psychological exploration or moral ambiguities. We are tempted to read into it a darker story about the moral compromises that petty employment and ambition force on you, and even a reflexive derision at the ease with which some ambiguous choices may be explained away with small gestures: Harpreet’s own cheating of his company, for instance, is explained away by his keeping meticulous accounts to pay it back at a later date.
But for all of grandpa’s shock at his grandson’s activities, he bails him out. If there is no melodrama, there are no wrenching moral choices to be explored either. So after an interesting first half, it flags in the second and remains very superficially focused on the thin storyline, and that’s what separates it from something like Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, one of the funniest, haunting evocations of lower-middle-class Delhi, its consumerist aspirations, its gaudy interiors and its wonderfully flawed, attractive and human characters.
Ranbir Kapoor was surprisingly tolerable and convincing as a well-meaning fellow who grows into his true self when put against the wall, and that too without any of the legendary dialogue to help him ‘emote’ his anger and frustration. This is the first film I’ve seen him in. I can’t get used to how like his mum he looks, though, and I kept thinking of him as a thin, tall and turbaned Neetu Singh. Like it took forever to get the idea of a badly dressed and awkward Sharmila Tagore, when seeing Saif Ali Khan’s ghastly early films. But he didn’t speak Hindi in this fake, I-don’t-really-speak-this-language-you-know kind of English-medium accent that many of the characters in the new urban-chic Hinglish films do. He managed to blend into the gritty, sales world quite well, I thought. The starlet who played his somewhat dumb girlfriend in the film spoke like that, though, and it was very annoying.
All in all, a friday evening enjoyable spent, with a finished project at the end, too, which I shall blog about shortly…
I haven’t watched any Hindi movies in a long time. I enjoyed Khosla ka Ghosla, totally unbelievable though it was, for the very reasons you have elaborated so well.
I’ve only seen photos of Ranvir and was very struck, like you, by how he’s the spitting image of Neetu Singh! LOL at your Saif/Sharmila comment too.
Suddenly feel very old for remembering Neetu, Rishi and that whole “parent” generation of actors. Gah!