Fukrey 3, Reviewed: Extreme Toilet Humour

The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar Speaks To The Power Of Unfettered Imagination

Roald Dahl’s sensibilities as a storyteller and allegorist find a perfect home in Wes Anderson’s cinematic oeuvre, writes Prahlad Srihari.

CLOCKING in at 39 minutes but densely packed with incident, wit and visual wonder, Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar centres around the wealthy Englishman (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) of the title who learns to see without his eyes, an ability that allows him to cheat at cards and become even wealthier. Avarice leads to emptiness leads to self-reflection leads to self-reformation. The moral order of a flushbunking but swashboggling world is inevitably re-established. The joy, however, lies in how Anderson uses his stream of quirkiness and his prodigious ensemble of ripe tragicomic talent to transform Roald Dahl’s written word into a darkly imaginative diorama for the screen. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar marks Anderson’s second adaptation of a Dahl story after 2009’s Fantastic Mr Fox. It is the flagship entry in an anthology of four Dahl adaptations, with The Swan, The Ratcatcher and Poison arriving on Netflix in the next three days.

At the core of the film is an appealing idea: of training the mind's eye in such a way as to develop the skill to push the limits of human perception and direct the consciousness beyond material boundaries. As Schopenhauer suggested, we tend to take the limits of our field of vision for the limits of the world. We trust what we see in the light. But the whole truth lies beyond, in the shadows, in our blind spots. On the flipside, the built-in fundamental limit of our vision should not always be considered a hindrance. Because if we could see everything, even with eyes closed, it would make everything knowable and thus foreseeable. Where then would be the mystery to life? As Henry comes to realise in the film, there would be “no thrill, no suspense, no danger.” In a scene, Henry’s extra-ocular vision works like an X-ray: his body becomes a grotesquely transparent apparatus, revealing the biological inner workings. Let's say you knew the exact thing that is going to kill you, wouldn't knowing it for certain ruin how you live your present? Continue reading...

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Fukrey 3: All About Toilet Humour (Literally)

By Ishita Sengupta

THERE are films with toilet humour and there are films like Fukrey 3, which drag humour to the toilet. Every moment, every scene, every joke in this Mrighdeep Singh Lamba outing has been designed, thought of, and orchestrated as an excuse to talk about shit and urine. As if the director and the writer (Vipul Vig), the original conspirators of the franchise, went to the loo several times when facing creative bankruptcy and then did the most natural thing in the world. They looked down and thought: “Wait, why don’t we make this the story?”

If you are telling me that this is not what happened, that two people actually did sit down and write Fukrey 3, and that more people sitting in important positions heard the plan and agreed to it, then I have a question — when did we come to this? When did we reach that stage in filmmaking where the sight of an actor urinating is the plot and the joke, the social message and the punchline? When did we sign up to watch scenes and scenes of Pulkit Samrat and Varun Sharma exercising and drinking water because some bright bulb in the writing room came up with a creative intervention so bizarre that it will put the entire Housefull series to shame? When did it become acceptable to make the whole story revolve around one man urinating and one man sweating because apparently, if you can somehow find a way to throw a diamond into someone’s stomach, both these liquids can make petrol together? When did we stop teaching Chemistry in school?

What has happened with Fukrey 3 is what happens with most successful franchises. Once the initial films are successful, the producers keep expanding the series to cater to an existing audience and milking it for money. The actors are given nothing to work with as the quality of scripts falls more steeply than any market can recover from. But what has happened with Fukrey 3 is also a case study unto itself, in the way it makes it abundantly clear the extent to which production houses take the audience for granted for the sake of money.

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