One of the evergreen Indian films of all time – Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The one with pure heart will conquer the girl) released in 1995 completed its 500th week in Bombay’s Maratha Mandhir Cinema Hall. Apparently it is still running full houses on weekends and public holidays!

This is the film that started the trend to pander the NRI’s and tug their purse strings in the guise of nostalgic entertainment. This one did it the best – lush beautiful locales, catchy music, wonderful screen chemistry and high production values. This film worked at all levels, like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who am I to you?)

I came across an indie movie ‘Let’s Talk’ from India at my local Mercer Island Library. The premises sounded interesting, so I picked it up last week and watched it yesterday. It is a small budget movie, shot with 3 actors and 2 rooms. I have a fascination with movies shot with limited resources, locations and characters. I like to see how they pull it off. This movie was shot with a $2,500 Sony DSR-PD100 3-Chip DVCAM with anamorphic adapters. The movie was then reverse telecined to 35mm after being shot full digital. Apparently this is the first reverse telecined movie in India.

The story is simple: Radhika bears a child out of wedlock, and mentally conjures up different ways her husband Nikil (Boman Irani) would react when she tells him. I was immediately reminded of Harold Ramis’ excellent Groundhog Day (1993) – one of my fav all time movies. Lets see if it is an inspired effort or an original one.

Structure
Why am I talking about its Structure ? Coz it is so unique that it forms the backbone of this movie. It is a straightforward ‘non-linear’ format (pun intended). It is based on Indian Classical Musical form Tumri – where the same lyric is repeated over and over in different moods. So here the lead character imagines how her husband will react when she breaks him the news. So we go through a cycle of Depression, Denial, Disbelief, Anger, Understanding, Violence and Jealousy. Each non-linear transitional portions are musically overlapped with tumri music with “Do you know what is love?”. There is also an unnecessary sub-plot as jarring as bad rock music.

Review:
As a new-age movie, the dialogues were excellent – so natural and flows like a normal conversation between two people. It was almost impossible to believe the dialogues were simply rehearsed lines spoken by actors. It had overlaps, casual mannerisms, off track dialogues. Full marks to the dialogues team (which comprised of both lead actors and director) to have perfectly captured the lingo of upper middle class Mumbaiites.

Boman Irani (famous for Munnabhai MBBS) is excellent as Nikil – but sometimes his acting goes over the top or he looks uninterested. But to his credit many times I almost forgot he is an actor, he was just Nikil (the scene in which he demands Radhika to discuss the issue with him right now – he shows irritation which looks so real that it made me clench my fist uneasily – excellent). Miai as Radhika was very good – but very hollow – I don’t know if it is the character which she plays is hollow or her acting was.

Direction by Ram Madhavani was unfortunately very visible. He used a few gimmicks which took away the sophistication from the movie. Use of digital camera gave the director a good opportunity to extract spontaneous performances from his actors – as digital productions tend to have smaller crew and un-intimidating equipment which relaxes the actors. Lighting and cinematography was poor – and as usual the blame was shifted on Digital Medium. Poor composition, blown out highlights, and glaring lighting doesn’t give the film makers an excuse to blame the medium. But that is exactly what they did. You can easily spot the cinematographers shadow in the screen and lighting from odd places. Who would keep a bright light on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet ? Only those who require sidelight to fall on actors face. So obvious mistakes like these distract the viewer and take us off track wondering about whose shadow was it on screen – like I was.

Sound design was very good, and so was sound mixing. They had a few blue screening – which also was a bit gimmicky but I guess it was a necessary gimmick to show overlap. Overall a good novel effort – pushed to big league due to extremely natural dialogues, and situational simplicity – but the overall movie didn’t impress me as I had a hard time trying to figure out who the real Nikil was, and what would have really happened in those 6 scenarios had the real character been present. Good to know indie films are getting decent distribution in India (Shringar Films), and how well they stand is up to the content of the movie. For a movie like this, once the novelty falls off the content should keep people glued. But due to the lack of any impending foreseeable resolution as audience we lose interest in the characters.

Credits:
Director: Ram Madhvani
Producer: Shift Focus (Ram Madhvani and Sumantra Ghosal)
Actors: Boman Irani, Maia Katrak, Anahita Uberoi
Scriptwriters: Maia Katrak, Boman Irani, Sanjay Sipahimalani, Ram Madhvani
Music: Ram Sampath
Cinematographer: Sumantra Ghosal

*** (3/5)