Indian Writing

I know I’m really late with this, but I need to vent NOW. Corporate is hideously bad. It’s tacky, moralistic, badly written, badly made, and I can’t find a single good thing to say about it. I thought Page 3 was a refreshing kind of film, well scripted and reasonably well done (great performances by Konkona Sensharma, Sandhya Mridul, Boman Irani), despite the moralising about the other kinky habits of P3Ps - they drink! they smoke! gasp - they sleep around!

But Corporate is a different thing altogether. Nishigandha Dasgupta (Bipasha Basu) is a high-ranking executive in Sehgal Foods. Vinay Sehgal (Rajat Kapoor) and Something Marwah (Raj Babbar) are competitors in the food product industry. Nishigandha is in a relationship with Ritesh-No-Surname (Kay Kay Menon), Vinay Sehgal’s brother-in-law who is back from London on a second chance.

Eeyagh. This movie doesn’t even deserve to be written about except that it’s so bad. But onward, onward. So the two groups, the Sehgals and the Marwahs, are in hot competition not only for business but also for a business award given away by Javed Akhtar playing himself. They hobnob with netas, hand out bribes, touch the feet of sundry swamis.

To cut to the chase, Bipasha steals information from the competition using “womanly wiles” (what else would you expect from a female corporate executive, seems to be the theme) and inducement, including a sex worker - and the Sehgal Group promptly gets to launch a mint-flavoured, puke-inducingly blue drink called Just Chill.

Small problem - the stuff is full of pesticides. (Resonances, resonances!!) Because their bottling plant is in Panvel, and the Panvel-Khopoli farmers apparently use lots of pesticides. Even the C-word is mentioned - the stuff can cause cancer, it can affect pregnant women. But Big Bad Corporate Daddy decides to go ahead with the launch nevertheless. His CEO (Harsh Chaya) has a sudden attack of ethics and resigns. Bipasha and Kay Kay look on, their eyes filling up with tears. But they stay on to launch the sickening blue fluid which, by now, has begun to look more and more like diluted toilet cleaner.

So, first there was Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, now there’s Big Soft Drink. You can guess the rest. Competition finds out, media is informed, issue blows up, politicians are met, and finally Nishi, who becomes the sacrificial lamb, goes into custody in an explosion of television cameras. Kay Kay feels awful, but move on, move on. It’s only when he hears that Nishi is pregnant “with his child” that he decides, in his turn, to have an attack of ethics. Which, for him, means getting all tremulous and emotional with Jijaji. And so on.

Never mind that Nishi had been fully aware of the implications of sending that vile blue stuff into the market, and that the only sad thing is that the others aren’t also in jail, doing their share of time. We’re supposed to feel sorry that she’s in there at all.

From the old days of “Tumne hamare khandaan ki izzat ko mitti mein mila diya” we are now in the brave new Bollywood of “Hamare teen hazaar crore ka project ko mitti mein mila diya.” But little else has changed, and the mawkish sentimentality, the cheap moralising, the bletchy lines, are all the same.

Particularly offensive were two creepy office attendants who kept making supposedly “common-man” remarks and vulgar sexist jokes. There was also a weird scene in which Ashok Pandit (playing a journalist called Ashok Pandit, haha very funny) appears to interview an effeminate film director. What was that about, aside from the homophobic overtones?

Awful music, except for one Kailash Kher song which was, well, like a Kailash Kher song. And please, next time anyone tries to tell me that Madhur Bhandarkar makes films with strong women characters, I’ll barf. This film has a very weird approach to women.

If the film had been anywhere near Page 3 one could at least have talked about comparing it with Kalyug, if not Ray’s Seemabaddha (which I love, despite Sharmila) - and with a better script the film might have actually been a comment on shining India - but Corporate is such a cringe-inducingly bad experience that it’s best forgotten as soon as possible.

Just when I was thinking, towards the end of the movie, that Minissha Lamba’s was the one half-way decent performance - A~ turns to me and says, this is the woman who gave an interview saying that she was doing everything she could to make her hips larger.