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Showing posts from February 14, 2010

More seek than hide: the simple riddles of Vihir

The guy in green played: Nachiket The guy in white played: Samya The small girl played: Soni The man in black: Umesh Kulkarni (director) The man in white churidaar: Girish Kulkarni (producer and co-script writer). More seek than hide : the simple riddles of Vihir Writing a review or even a critical note on Vihir is a daunting task for two reasons: one, the film has such a rich polyphonic repertoire that it is almost impossible for an untrained reviewer like me to do any justice to the film, and second, it has already been brilliantly written about by Shekhar Deshpande on http://dearcinema.com/. The Berlinale 2010 screening has also been reported there . Therefore, rather than a standard review that recounts the basic storyline, this note tries to raise certain issues related to the thematics of the film. In teh post-screening interaction, the first question thrown at Umesh Kulkarni, the director of the movie, was about the fate of Nachiket. The film I guess left a section of audien

Road Movie: Enlivening cinema, critiquing modernity

Road Movie : Enlivening cinema, critiquing modernity I was a bit disappointed when I realised that there wouldn’t be any post-screening discussion on the movie. It was so because this brilliant film made me hungry to listen to the words coming from the horse’s mouth. And partly because I also wanted to stick up my neck for asking certain questions that, more or less, are still the first-impressions (yes, its still not more than a few hours that I saw the movie). As the name suggests, quite literally, the film is about two things: road and movie(s). The storyline is simple and elegant: Vishnu (Abhay Deol) is unhappy to support and take over his father’s business of producing and selling Atma hair oil. He got a chance to ‘do a favour to his friend’ (as he kept saying throughout the movie) to drive a truck to Samudrapur) – I guess an imaginative place situated by the sea. The journey then becomes the central focus of the film, as different events and plots unfold in the course. He is stop