Haseena Parkar (2017) Review!!!

Synopsis – This is the story of the slightly-less-notorious sister of a notorious gangster.

My Take – It is an open secret that Bollywood filmmakers are obsessed over the rise of India’s dreaded gangster Dawood Ibrahim, a man who currently also sits on FBI’s most wanted list. While films like Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai, Company, D, to name a few, have already provided an in-depth insight into the man’s psyche, director Apoorva Lakhia and writer Suresh Nair, here, attempt a fresh approach to a tried and tested formula by setting up sequences through the life of his sister, Haseena. Famously known as the Godmother of Nagapada, the younger sister of Dawood Ibrahim was widely believed to have taken up the control of Dawood’s operations in India, all the while notoriously running an extortion racket in Mumbai & was also allegedly involved in hawala rackets in sending money from India to Middle East and vice versa between 1990s and 2000s. Keeping in mind that director Lakhia had also directed 2007s Shootout At Lokhandwala, which highlighted the real-life gun battle of Maya Dolas in 1991, expectations were soared, mainly as when you step in to watch a biopic of a relatively less known, you expect to watch everything that you ever wanted to know about the person involved, something that you would not find on the Wikipedia page & something that shakes you and you’re engrossed- elbow deep. Unfortunately, while the events of her life are quite eventful, its cinematic translation is simply vapid and utterly boring! The film is just so preachy & confused, it’s hard to understand whether you should sympathize with her character or just hate her for being a good sister to the most wanted man in the world. Above all, the miscast pairing of the Kapoor siblings really plays a spoilsport.

The story follows Haseena Parker (Shraddha Kapoor), who in the near-present day is on trial for an extortion case filed by a builder, and is thrown into a cluster of accusations from public prosecutor Rohini Satam (Priyanka Setia). Going back and forth in flashbacks, we see how Haseena, a dark skinned, timid girl, who was just one amongst the 12 children of honest constable Ibrahim Kaskar and his wife, Amina Bi, and lived together lived in a small house in Dongri, Mumbai. Despite putting their father in spot for being involved in all things illegal, Haseena continued to share a special bond with her brother, Dawood Ibrahim (Siddhant Kapoor). But Dawood was unstoppable, and along with his brother Sabir, he quickly rose to fame as the king of the underworld. However, Haseena moves on with life by getting married to Ibrahim Parkar (Ankur Bhatia), a bulky part time actor who also ran a small restaurant. Living in her small happy world with her husband and four children, away from her brother’s crimes, her life changes when Dawood flees abroad and orchestras the infamous 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, and Ibrahim is gunned down by Dawood’s rivals. Despite being clueless about her brother’s involvement, Haseena becomes the target for police officials who claim she had knowledge of the attacks & consider her as an accomplice. Tired of being hassled around due to her middle class status, Haseena decides to use her brother’s status & the loyal support of his men to rise as a fixer to some & a godmother to the rest. Right from the first scene, the entire courtroom drama is jarring, clichéd and baseless. The lawyer despite of not having a single witness keeps arguing for hours and screams on top of her voice. It’s sad to see how despite the intriguing subject matter, director Apoorva Lakhia‘s film is over simplified and is unable to hold your attention for a long time. The first half has promise with its atmospheric recreation of the grubby Mumbai locality where one of the world’s most wanted men and his sister spent their early years in financial struggle. The costumes, styling and production design are effective, however, as the second half begins the whole film begins to steer into a downward spiral. There are many loopholes and where simplification is required, the ends are left lose. The screenplay cuts back and forth to the courtroom where the defense lawyer Shyam Keswani rubbishes the prosecutor Roshni Satam’s argument that Parkar is a key player in her brother’s empire. He declares that her presentation is more of a debate than a legal case, as there are barely any witnesses or evidence available. In spite of a good set up, the flatness in the script and the one-sidedness of the narrative are most glaring in the courtroom scenes. The story fails to grab your attention and keeps wobbling at every level. Ibrahim’s assassination, the police interrogation, followed by her humiliation, her son’s track and such scenes are forcefully stretched to the fullest only to make you feel the pain of her character. The film’s lack of nuance in places is painfully literal. When a character says Parkar became an outlaw because she was tired of the finger pointing she was subjected to merely for being Ibrahim’s sister, the director feels the need to actually show us a montage of people pointing fingers.

To be fair, it’s hard to pinpoint the weakest link here: the writing which is full of clichés, or director Lakhia’s treatment of the subject, typically overblown but hollow. Wait, I’ll tell you what truly cripples the film – it’s the fact that you never get a real sense of who Haseena was, even after watching her life on screen for a little over two hours. Haseena’s transformation from the meek, uneducated daughter of an honest police constable to the powerful, intimidating figure believed to have run Dawood’s illegal operations in India seems completely half-baked and strictly surface level. The script feels like a Wikipedia entry of sorts, a checklist of key events and incidents that supposedly shaped her life, like the headline-making events: the shooting of Dawood’s brother Sabir Kaskar, the JJ Hospital shoot-out, the riots of 1992 and the ensuing bomb blasts of 1993. Her first fist-fight with a complex compartment bully comes as a shock because you never perceive her as someone who can punch down people. The impactful act, though a bit bizarre, comes undone right in the next scene when she acts all petrified in front of her husband. She goes on to punch quite a few people then on, some men included, making us wonder why director Lakhia isn’t exploring this violent streak in her. As far as Haseena’s personality goes, she is hard to decode, at least from this film. Parkar intervenes in disputes only because she wants to be a Good Samaritan. She bullies builders and landowners, but only because they harass the poor. After a point though, it is clear that the script is going nowhere as it avoids taking a position on any of the parties involved. And so, the dominant image of Ibrahim here is of a thoughtful elder brother, what we get of Parkar too is a rose-tinted view, neither is projected as being particularly evil or culpable, and the film does not offer a single bit of information or a new insight to justify its take on them, nothing about the duo that you would not gather from news reports and editorials. In fact, the film is so gentle on its protagonists; you might be forgiven for assuming that they are/were amateur pickpockets and shoplifters, not hardened criminals. Every bad deed is cloaked as a good one, doing both the film and its subject a huge disservice. Suresh Nair’s screenplay also assumes that nobody in the audience has watched a Dawood Ibrahim origins story before, and re-runs the by-now-very familiar narrative of how Ibrahim overcame the beatings meted out by his disciplinarian (and honest) police constable father to assume power in the Mumbai underworld by slaughtering his opponents. On the positive side, Dawood’s fight scenes along with his initial bonding scenes with Haseena are decent among the worst. The transformation of Haseena, from a naive girl to a powerful one is bit interesting. Leading a cast filled with mostly unknowns, Shraddha Kapoor is both miscast and woefully out of depth in the role of the lead protagonist, who here is portrayed as a victim of circumstances. Even though she tries hard to slip inside the skin of her character, she mildly succeeds. She is further hampered by the film’s intent and clumsy prosthetics. Her mumps type face looks terrible. It’s so bad that the moment she starts talking you will feel that the stuffed cotton inside her face might fall out. Her real life brother, Siddhant Kapoor (Shootout at Wadala, Ugly), portrays the role of Dawood Ibrahim well, although in the second half, his character is reduced to be the one living in posh White House in Dubai. Post intermission, he either appears in TV as a terrorist in news or else talking to Haseena over phone. Ankur Bhatia is good, while Priyanka Setia is loud. On the whole, ‘Haseena Parkar’ is a shallow, superficial, lazy drama which despite its subject matter offers no grit, just an unremarkable tedious watch.