Jan 16, 2007 09:54 AM
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“My father advised me not to dream. Dreams never come true. But I saw a dream”, says the deep baritone of Abhishek Bachchan with ’Jaage hain’ track trying its best to make its presence felt through the background. Thus begins the movie with high expectations considering the starcast and the infallible Mani Ratnam.
Gurukant Desai (Abhishek Bachchan) is the son of a teacher belonging to Idhar village in Gujarat. But Guru is a failure at studies and has made big plans to go abroad to work. His father though never believes in the ability of his son. Guru is amazingly ambitious and supremely confident about his abilities. So he joins Shell in Istanbul, Turkey, selling oil cans and does very well in that job to merit a promotion within 3 years. When offered the promotion, Guru refuses saying, “Agar main idhar achcha kaam kar sakta hun to khud ke liye kyon na karu!” (If I can work so well for some foreign company then why not work for myself?). He leaves the job and returns to his village to pursue dreams of setting up his own company.
Guru marries his best friend Jignesh’s sister Sujata (Aishwarya Rai) who is one year elder to him and even though she tried to run away with someone from her village because he will receive a lot of money in dowry from Sujata’s father with which he can start his business. And he also promises to make his best friend-turned-brother in law a partner in his business. So everyone is happy with this deal and the marriage is ritualised!
Guru, Sujata and Jignesh then proceed to Bombay to try their luck which Guru is absolutely sure is going to click. He is supremely confident of making it big in Mumbai. But he faces a slew of obstacles and emerges out of them successfully through plain guts (never is any unethical practice shown which is somehow brought up towards the end!!) which border on foolishness. After a few successes with the help of Gandhian newspaper owner fondly referred to as Nanaji, Guru becomes very confident and starts making rapid strides. Jignesh cannot keep pace and leaves Guru and also takes Sujata with him.
Guru, on the other hand, though is slightly worried about these happenings. But he has reached a point of no-return and continues with completing those large half-strides that he has already taken. He goes for a public issue and creates his own company manufacturing polyester and keeps growing. Somewhere along the way he goes back to his village and brings Sujata back home.
Guru finally reaches a stage where he begins using the media and others to achieve more success. Nanaji suddenly (another point of concern here is that, the war cries are let out on what the audience sees as something harmless) realises this is where their roads clash and resolves to fight Guru to the end. According to Nanaji, Guru has now become a disease of the society that needs to be stopped in his tracks. Shyam Saxena (Madhavan) is nanaji’s protege who believes that people like Guru need to be jailed and the key thrown into the sea. So, the movie builds up to the interval as a fight between Guru and Nanaji (through Shyam) with Guru saying, “Mujhe koi nahi rok sakta. Na aap, na yeh Shyam Saxena, na yeh akbaar!”. (Nobody can stop me. Neither you nor Shyam Saxena or your newspaper!”)
When I got up from my seat during the interval I realized my eyes were aching because the camera had moved so much that it almost had me tired. I was tired of watching those close-ups. In order to avoid covering much of the background because it was a period setting the camera was focussed on close-ups rather than any other beautiful reason that the camera man Rajiv Menon can conjure. And as the timeline approached the 80’s it was relatively safe to take those long shots. I thought the cinematography could have been better. Atleast by Mani’s standards we have seen much better pictures than the work done here. This looks like Mani’s first shot at a period film (A classic called ‘Iruvar’ was also by the same gentleman, ’Guru’ ends during the late 90’s or around that time) and it shows through the cinematography. All that unnecessary slow motion shots during the climax court scene made me feel dizzy. But I should mention that the movie is crystal clear visually - no dots, lines, nothing. Pure digital print I guess.
Coming back to what happened after the interval: The fight between Guru and Nanaji climaxes with the shareholders of Guru’s company questioning his ethics and integrity. Guru lands up in a lawsuit and how he wriggles out of it forms the remaining part of the story. The dialogue in the climax is good and hard-hitting but needed more populist punchlines. The applause that Mani expects to generate in the audience during that scene is obviously missing and that is very embarassing for a movie-maker of Mani’s calibre.
A better dialogue writer would have helped, maybe? But the dialogue writer would have helped if Mani had the right concept in the first place. You cannot justify whatever wrong you have done just because your company is held by the public. That isn’t Mani, but offlate (’Bombay’ for instance) Mani has been resorting to endings that are politically correct and incoherent with the cinema he is trying to make. I thought Guru would have been better if he had potrayed Guru as someone who is unabashedly open about whatever he has done is for himself. Instead of using his shareholder base as a reason for doing so many wrongs.
Frankly, I was not impressed with the movie at all. A typical rags to riches story is what we all knew it was about. But then with Mani Ratnam wielding the microphone you expected better stuff. Alas! Mani misses the bus! The execution of the story lacks conviction and is too unbelievably fantasy-like. And the ending lets you down so much you actually walk out of the theatre wanting to know how the jury decided to acquit Guru after having a 30 secs chat that resembled the coffee-vending machine chats at any software company!
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