Of shades and colours. Review on Black And White

If there is one scene in ’showman’ Subhash Ghai’s Black and White that underlines his ulterior motive, then that scene, I think, comes just before the excruciatingly long climax–We see Numair Qazi(debutante Anurag Sinha) and Rajen Mathur(played with great understanding and restraint by Anil Kapoor) praying.Ghai casts grey-blue light on Qazi, and contrasts it with divine sunlight on Mathur–thats the disillusioned versus the enlightened for dummies, if you will.The central idea the film purportedly espouses is that of harmony among the various strands in the national populace–so you have a mini microcosm of sorts for India here–.the Nehruvian grandfather, the Sikh(Manjeet Singh), the Bengali torn between Hindu’s and Muslims(Shefali Shah, deciding to ham it up), the power brokers, the politician in cahoots with the militia, and all that represents earthly charms in Shagufta(newcomer Aditi Sharma).Ghai sets up these in Chandni Chowk, and through his narrative tries to iron over these antagonistic strands while the curio unfolds.Sadly, the setting through sheer clumsiness of execution remains just a schema.

Cinematically, Ghai mars the effect of some of his best scenes through either stilted dialogue hell bent on thesis mongering or some obfuscatingly shaky camerawork or a thumpety thump background score hell bent on making the viewer’s ears bleed.I on a personal level was quite infuriated by the stand Ghai takes on the Hindu Sangh and the Muslim league.Apart from that the whole subplot, of falling for the earthly charms seems contrived after all–I can see the effect but the cause, and motive did not convince me–I could not really see why Shagufta would fall for Numair in the first place?The cutaways from newsreel footage are quite easily discernible–so much so for good CG effects.The machination of the episode that allows for the infiltration of Qazi into the professor’s house is well and truly ridiculous.Though I think I can give credit to Ghai for eschewing sentimentality and not over-dramatizing the narrative.

And since he is the showman he does manage to string together a few impressive sequences, say, for instance the sequence of Roma's(Shefali Shah) murder-the sequence sees Roma wearing white covered in black, Anil Kapoor wearing white and Shagufta wearing black offering a rose to Qazi -the  push and pull morality symbolism is too obvious too miss here or the climatic fight between Qazi and Gunaji's character where we see Qazi punching the latter, but he isnt hurting him so much as he is hurting his own self-killing his own self-as the footage shows us.So its only a shame that the film is never more than the sum of its parts.

The snatches at the personal life of various characters in the film seem to suggest that Ghai is trying to do a Mani Ratnam here-but where Mani is always successful is that the scenes of his side characters are so successful that you dont even wish to go back to the main narrative, no matter how intriguing the whole setup might be-Ghai's sequences in comparison are too pat.More importantly, since the film purportedly boasts of an innovative narrative, I dont see why the central character has to have a whole BSP(background-setup-payoff) lineage.

Anurag Sinha’s Qazi is the central figure of the film–a tough, radical Islamist, rigid in his beleifs and very difficult to predict.That last bit seems the reason why Anurag plays him in such an opaque manner, but overall I have the same problem with his performance that I had with Neil Nitin Mukesh’s in Johnny Gaddar–they just didnt really manage to highlight the anguish via their eyes.I will have to wait for his next film before I can make any further opinion of him.The film though on a scale of five would languish somewhere between 1 and 2 for me