Actors: Amitabh Bachchan, Preity Zinta, Arjun Rampal
Ranking: * *
Even when she's not being harmlessly sarcastic, Jaya Bachchan makes a lot of sense. Recently I read one of her quotes where she says, "With age, a lot of your acting mechanisms (begin to) change. All your emotional faculties become exaggerated. A smile looks like a grin; a sniff becomes a sob." One has to be careful about how the camera catches you. Though never explicitly stated, I suspect, those words could be directed at her husband, with particular reference to this film. Bachchan plays the sole hero here. He is also quite obviously the longest-serving hero in the history of mainstream Hindi cinema. Over some of his past few films (Black, Bhootnath, Aag), you may find the actor bordering toward an exaggeration of his own self.
The word hammy would be as unfair as to label this performance his career's best, which the publicity material of this film unfortunately does. Be that as it may, a long-haired, garrulous beard of Avon is quite simply the only reason you may even look to this film. The filmmaker has thought of no other as well. Beyond the high-voltage, you ceaselessly search for what the movie is really about.
Bachchan plays a retired Shakespearean theatre actor. He lives in a crumbling home in Kolkata, with a much younger live-in girlfriend (Shefali Shah), and a fresh memory of lines from his plays of youth. At one point, a director approaches him for a leading part in his film about an old, unemployed circus-clown, when circuses are no more. Rampal brilliantly plays that director, using again his good looks and a stone-face to advantage, as a brooding, quiet creative man in Rock On!!.
The Shakespearan star agrees to do the film, but he takes a while to be cajoled. In a movie, he says, when you see the face, you can't see the hands and legs; when you see the face, hands and legs, you can't see much of the person. It's the director who decides what you must see. Theatre is clearly more the actor's medium. On the film-set as well, the sexagenarian actor feels frustrated by limitations of his involvement. He does offer an advice to his novice co-star (Preity Zinta) who, until late, was a fashion model. The greatest attribute of an actor, he says, isn't his power of observation, but his eagerness to perform. You can sense that eagerness in the hero's manners. Much as you'd like to emotionally engage with this crazy old man, of all, it's this central character in fact that confuses you most: part-loony, part-serious, but wholly unexplained, you cannot quite tell who Bachchan's Harish or Harry is; where he's coming from; what his problems are, besides partial blindness (whoever said a film-actor cannot wear glasses, or contact lenses).Shakespeare, the 16th century playwright, was no more relevant (or irrelevant) in the 1970s as he is now. This couldn't be about an aged has-been either. He didn't leave theatre for professional reasons either. For a conflict (or indeed a story), Ghosh endlessly concerns us with two women around the hero's death-bed: a nurse (Divya Dutta), and a film star (Zinta). Both are involved in unhealthy, insecure relationships. Neither has anything to do with the substance of this film. Somehow nothing falls into place, but for the bombastic Mr Bachchan. You leave let-down. "In my mind's eye… That it should come to this!" (Hamlet, Act I, Scene II).
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