It is a beautiful movie but it leaves us with a feeling that it would have been certainly a great movie if ………….
The movie is about a very talented boy who suffers from dyslexia and consequently has learning disabilities that are neither understood by his teachers nor by his own father, although his mother, probably like all intuitive women, knows that there is a problem but cannot identify it until Mr Aamir Khan – the new art teacher in the school -- comes along and makes a correct diagnosis and the story moves forward.
The movie, to say the least, does come as a whiff of fresh air after having watched or (having refused to watch) most of the stale and stereotype movies that Bollywood has been offering all these years. It is technically very sound; its musical score is different but faithful to the spirit of the central idea. Now more about the ‘ifs’. These ‘ifs’, to me, mainly comprise of some exaggeration in portrayal of some characters and some inconsistencies in the behavioral pattern of the central character—Master Ishan Avasthi.
The credit titles, at the beginning, hints at a little exaggeration, when they inform you that the teaching staff at the School was not as bad as may have been projected. Fine, but the movie exaggerates a little beyond that. Almost all members of the faculty of the boarding school are ill-disposed, rather unconvincingly, towards the students’ community in general, and particularly hostile to Ishan. A behavioral change, to be convincing, has to be gradual and cannot travel from one extreme to another in a jiffy, without any apparent justification.
We all sit up when Ishan tries to interpret a poem as – “one sees things, sometimes, even when they are not there and sometimes sees them not even when they are actually there”. Very profound and very surrealistic indeed! . We all know that it would be very difficult to show a continuation of this central idea and realize that this quote was used merely to improve the form of the movie and had nothing to do with its substance. As the movie nears its end, we see that on the day of the Art Competition, Ishan leaves his hostel dormitory early morning and goes to his favorite landscape so that he can recapture it in his painting for the competition and which he does so effectively. He paints what he sees. But then what happens to the great surrealistic promise that he had made to us while explaining that poem?
I now recall something what an army friend had said many years ago, about Hindi movies– Hindi cinema is NOT self-conscious. Notwithstanding what I have written above, this movie is certainly self-conscious. Besides that, one should see it for some great acting. Aamir Khan is, as usual very competent. The boy, playing Ishan is incredibly superb but kudos also to the Casting Director who selected him after screen-testing hundreds or rather thousands of them. But I was struck by the pair that plays boys’parents. I have not seen more believable parents on the screen. They are not filmy whatsoever, they look absolutely real. The woman’s face did look familiar and I may have seen it on the small screen earlier, but in this movie she was faceless or rather she had the face of every Indian mother. I was particularly impressed by the actor who played Mr Awasthi senior. He shouts, bullies and uses the usual parental template while dealing with his younger son; grudgingly concedes later that he may not have been able to understand root cause of his son’s problem and cries profusely in the end after realizing that he had almost failed his son till Ishan was rescued by the art teacher. But probably these are also the tears of joy – a great tragedy had been averted and his son had, at last, been restored to him and to the world of material success, to which he – Mr Awasthi senior --had always belonged.
Labels: bollywood, kurlekaar, movies
