A late review.Of late I have been very busy with several things happening at the same time. Couldn't take time off to watch this movie. And after watching it I didn't get time to write about it.
The first and the foremost reason to write this 'late review' ( i skipped writing about Jab We Met and Aaja Nachle because I could not write the draft in the first week) is the newcomer Anurag Sinha. But i will come to it later :)
Has Subhash Ghai made "Black and White"? Then who made "Yaadein" and "Kisna"? Forget it... I wont say that 'Black and White' is an excellent movie or a hat-ke type movie. But it does offer something new. After such a long time I heard actors speaking good Urdu. All actors, major or minor, spoke the language as it is spoken. I remember Rani Mukherji in Veer Zaara. She couldn't even pronounce her name in the movie correctly. It was a treat watching and listening to theatre actor Habib Tanvir after such a long time. The writers could have worked more on his character. When the old man learns that his grand-sons have some connections with terrorists he gets a shock and dies. I would have liked to see a confrontation scene between him and his grandsons. And may be in that discussion some light could have been thrown on the most important question---"What drives normal people towards terrorism?"
This movie is released around 10 years after Dil Se. There are so many parallels between their stories . The only major change is the end when the fidayeen realizes that whatever he has been instructed to carry out, will not do good to anybody. Not even to people of his religion, his race. It is just brainless-violence. Numair Qazi remains a man of few words, with an air of mystery around him throughout the movie. The moment when the realization sinks in could have been trapped in a better manner. The director could have tried to take us into the 'head' of a terrorist in order to understand his way of thinking. The movie failed in this aspect.
The movie's strength is not Anil Kapoor or Shefali Shah's performance. To some extent their characters, with so much 'goodness' seemed a little fake to me. It was Anurag Sinha who deserves an applause for his role as the fidayeen. The man has the intensity in his eyes. His expressions, his body-language, the eccentricity in his character, everything was perfect. I would love to see him in a different kind of role. After Abhay Deol, he is the only newcomer who seems impressive to me. Good work!
Somehow it always gets obvious as from where Mr Ghai would have drawn inspiration for his movies. The current one has the feel of Dil Se and also the real-life story of the Kashmiri professor of Dr Zakir Husain College, Delhi who was arrested for having terrorist-links, but released later. And the great movie of our times, Kisna, was inspired by Lagaan. Mr Ghai got so impressed by the story of a British girl falling in love with an Indian farmer (Elizabeth, jo avivahit reh ke Bhuvan ki Radha bani) that he decided to make an entire movie out of the end scene of Lagaan. Howz that? :-)
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