Painfully bad. Review on Nishabd

Perhaps what is more deplorable than some of the movies which Bollywood frequently churns out is the sheer number of people who actually go and watch the trash. Thus, in spite of knowing well what I was getting myself into, I decided to watch the grand old director of Indian cinema(who incidentally believes that no directors or actors are bad, it’s just the films that are, and steadfastly sticks to the same doctrine), direct the grand old man of Indian cinema in a strange mish-mash of two movies from the barbaric lands in the west, Poison Ivy and American Beauty, with the central theme of the rather amazing book by Nabokov, Lolita.

OK! A brief aside about the plot, which is seemingly non-existent. Vijay, who in contrast to the angry old Vijay of the times of yore, is a sad old man with a practical old wife, Amrita, who stays in a picturesque tea-estate, somewhere. Along comes his daughter, with a pretty and weird friend, named Jiah. The girl has come from one of the numerous broken families which abound the hinterland, hasn’t seen her father, and doesn’t have a sense of humor. She also likes to show her legs and flaunt them for one and all. In the midst of all this uncontrolled exposure, the couple, in this case, the sixty-year old Vijay and the nubile nymph Jiah fall in love with each other, and in a strange departure from tradition and common-sense, decide to proclaim their love to the world, while a decidedly stupid and inordinately loud background score(quite possibly inspired from Black), makes the glaringly obvious point that you have made the second mistake in the same month(the first was Red – the dark side). Thus the movie ends, sadly, with a profound bad taste.

So what are the problem(s) with the movie? The basic premise is interesting: there is nothing wrong with a sixty year old falling in love with a twenty year old, and trying to cling to his long-gone youth; it is but expected when the girl looks upon the old man as a father figure, but it’s this basic premise which the director wants to exploit and does not enunciate through sufficient dialogue and a worthy script, which results in the movie laying a big egg. Plus, there’s very little one can really say about a movie that starts with American Beauty, carefully hacks out the decent parts of the movie, and replace the same with material of origin that’s quite dubious. For example, in American Beauty, we had this scene in which Lester Burnham travels to dreamland. Consider what this has become in Nishabd: an extremely irritating fit of laughter, which pisses off his wife and the audience(at least, most of it).

Add to that, the roses, and you have a movie on your hands which tries hard to be intelligent and falls flat on its face. Then of course, when you copy from a movie which originally starred Jaime Pressley, maybe it’s too much to expect a swimming pool, but to replace the pool with a hosepipe and expect it to conjure up the same provocative images, is rank bad advertising, by any standards. On top of that we have the kind of young lady, with not more than two thoughts running around in the vast cavernous blackness of her skull, (thoughts which are more like rules which Wolfram cooks up for his cellular automata), which can basically be summarized by water=good and old man=want. Quite possibly, Ramu-da was influenced by what some great director once said about rules of cellular automata, replace these two with any arbitrary combination, and you have a movie.

Add to all this misplaced confusion, a maelstrom of second-hand emotion, which in the backdrop of exquisite imagery from the tea-gardens of the commun-east South-West, only goes to reconfirm the angry old man’s transformation to the sad old man that he is right now. And of course, who can forget the other kind of visuals which clutter the movie to no good effect. The final topping – the horrendous soundtrack which hovers between a horror movie and another pet hate(Kabhi khushi kabhi gham). Add all of this, and you have a movie which can inspire the worst kind of emotions in the most normal of people.

As a final take, this movie probably has everything to qualify itself for a perfect dud - the needless crying, the vaguely irrelevant remarks about families, the characters which seem like they are made of moldy cardboard, and a disgustingscreenplay, which incidentally is the primary destroyer of the movie. It just could have been so much better!