1. Larger Than Life
The real life Nanavati was Kawas Maneckshaw Nanavati, a well-decorated naval officer who killed his beloved wife’s lover in 1959. He was no saint. When he discovered his wife’s relationship with his best friend, he murdered the friend (and not the wife, as in Gulzar’s Achanak) and then surrendered to the law.
So far , the film follows the real case (except for the fact that Nanavati’s three children have been eliminated from the plot). But from this point onwards, Rustom deviates dangerously and indiscriminately from the original crime. You see, Rustom kills not only for love, but also for the country. Dangerous naval secrets were being passed out to the slain man from the Navy. Rustom intervened. So, Akshay’s Rustom become a far bigger hero than Nanavati could ever have been.
2 Uniform-ed!
Akshay Kumar’s Rustom Pavri is an angel in uniform. The naval togs never, I repeat NEVER, go off the man. World-record monitoring agencies: please note. This is the only film in the history of the motion picture where the hero wears his uniform in EVERY SINGLE FRAME. Rustom wears the uniform at home, and in prison. I am pretty sure he wears the uniform to the shower too and to bed too. Nanavati, we hear, used to wear pajamas to sleep.
3. The Triangle
Why, oh why must the adulterous wife be served up a cornucopia of alibis for her infidelity? Why must the lover be a cheating scheming insensitive blackmailer who took ‘advantage’ of the wife when her husband was away? Why can’t the wife be shown to get lonely while her husband is away for months at sea? Akshay Kumar proudly tells me there has been no movie since Vijay Anand’s Guide to show the heroine leaving her husband to be with the lover. Yes, Akshay, true . But Vijay Anand’s Rosy (Waheeda Rehman) had a cad for a husband and a rake for a lover. In Rustom, the wife has a demi-god for a husband and a horny dog for a lover.
4. Up In Smoke
The Censor Board knows the big secret about tobacco consumption that people back in the 1950s were oblivious to. Hence two characters, the wife’s lover Vikram Makhija, played by Arjan Bajwa, and his sister Preeti, played by Esha Gupta, smoke incessantly whenever they are on screen. Bad people smoked in our movies in the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s. Director Tinu Desai got so carried away by the dynamics of periodicity that he forgot this was 2016. (Can you imagine the catastrophic consequences if Ashutosh Gowariker forgot Mohenjo Daro was set in 2016… BC?!).
Since we know smoking kills (check the fine-print announcement at the right-hand bottom of the screen), Rustom Pavri needn’t have wasted the three bullets on Makhija.
5. The Women And Their War paint
The two main female characters in Rustom played Ileana d’Cruz and Esha Gupta are self-conscious, stark studies in contrast - like Nargis and Nadira in Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420. Although Ileana’s Cynthia cheats on her husband, she weeps, snivels, moans and sobs so consistently, her sins are washed away in glycerine. Like Nadira in Shree 420, Esha wears dangerously low-cut gowns and smokes cigarettes non-stop from a holder. We almost expect Esha to burst into Mud-mud ke na dekh mud-mud ke… nostalgia couldn’t get more versatile.
However, in spite of their antithetical personalities, Esha and Ileana do share common make-up kits. The crimson lipstick that Esha wears between her (cigarette-holding) lips is used as rouge on Ileana’s face and sometimes as bruises on her forehead. We understand the need to economise, since after paying Akshay Kumar his market price, there would have been very little money left for the make-up department. Either Ileana and Esha shared the war paint, or they could ask Akshay’s wife Twinkle to lend them some. In the real Nanavati case, we hear the murdered man’s sister and the accused man’s wife could afford their own make-up.
6. Journalist Russi Karanjia
Tabloid journalism’s legend Russi Karanjia would have sued if he had seen how he was portrayed in Rustom. Now, Kumud Mishra is a fine actor. He was brilliant as the home department’s reluctant do-gooder in that other (far more uplifting) Akshay-starrer Airlift. Here in Rustom, Kumud does a Bhojpuri version of a Parsi journalist. Russy was a man known for his impeccable manners. Wonder what he would have felt on seeing this…this…thing!
7. Child’s Play?
Child actor Naman Jain plays a young cocky newspaper seller who sells the sensational adulterous case on the streets of the meticulously constructed Mumbai of the 1950s. All of Mumbai in Rustom has only one newspaper seller. Naman is not only being made to break child-labour laws, he also says the most inappropriate things like ‘Ghar jao biwi akeli hai’ to his customers. Naman keeps getting saddled with these adult situations. In Zoya Akhtar’s short film in the omnibus Bombay Talkies, he played a little boy who is confused about his gender identity. We are worried about Naman’s childhood.
8. Law And Behold!
There is a feisty house-help Jamna Bai, played by the veteran fireball of talent Usha Nadkarni, who asks the aghast judge (Anang Desai, the most brilliant performer in Rustom) what he, the honourable judge, would do if he caught his wife with another man. The judge throws Jamna Bai into lock-up. Alas, there are no laws preventing filmmakers from subverting and twisting real-life crime cases to whip up a street-side version of a gourmet’s creation.
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