Rating : 5/10
Release Date : 7th November, 2014
Time : 132 minutes
Director: Ketan Mehta; Writers: Ketan Mehta, Sanjeev Dutta; Music : Sandesh Shandilya
Starring : Randeep Hooda, Nandana Sen, Gaurav Dwivedi, Vipin Sharma, Paresh Rawal, Jim Boeven, Feryna Wazheir, Darshan Jariwala, Suhasini Mulay, Tom Altar, Triptha Parashar, Rashaana Shah
One day, we, in India, will learn to make biopics. Where we will be happy to take one or two defining moments in a person’s life and focus an entire film around it, rather than attempting to show someone’s entire sixty-seventy year old lifespan in a couple of hours
This one takes Raja Ravi Varma’s life, played by Randeep Hooda, and attempts to show us, in a quite episodic manner, his love for painting, his love for staying at the forefront of art, his desire to allow art, especially with the aid of technology, to transcend the otherwise physical and moral constraints faced by artists of that era. It also spends a large part of the film showing us his extremely colorful life, especially with various women – Nandana Sen getting the most attention and notoriety.
There is a lot shown in the film, historical fact, that most of us are probably not aware of. But it is a very jerky style of story-telling, where we skip from one episode to another, without really, consistently understanding the man, his thought process. The scenes involving nudity are quite aesthetically done – don’t seem gratuitous or vulgar.
If a society were to be judged for how liberal it was in its arts, there was a time when we would probably rank right up there but the sad part is, today, we would probably be scraping the bottom of the barrel. We seem to have been this way for the better part of the last couple of hundred years at least, and in some ways, maybe even regressed. Just for a great speech towards the end, delivered calmly, without histrionics, and the core idea – of letting art soar free from a judgmental society – am going to be slightly generous with my rating.
