fLAweD Gem fILLeD wITh LoVe, pASSIoN

Lootera

STARRING: Sonakshi Sinha, ranveer Singh

WRITER-DIRECTOR: vikramaditya motwane HHHHH

Abeautiful but deeply flawed film, the eagerly-awaited Lootera floors you with its audacious sensitivity and its tendency to use silences to punctuate emotions. Indeed, the sequences between varun and Pakhi, played with compelling intensity by ranveer Singh and Sonakshi Sinha, bristle at the seams with unspoken feelings. There are long passages of muted lyricism where silences are used to accentuate the growing passion between a lonely, emotionally and sexually insulated daughter of a feudal family in Kolkata, and the attractive stranger who walks into her life with the promise of passion, only to break her heart into wounding shards.

The love story, apparently inspired by American writer o henry’s short story

The Last Leaf, moves in mysterious ways, but often tends to lose its way in its search for that elusive horizon where two socially, culturally and economically incompatible people in love, hanker to unite, but seldom do.

The film wears two distinctly ‘classic’ looks in bustling Kolkata and snowy dalhousie, both shot with discreetness by cinematographer mahendra Shetty. The Kolkatan periodicity of the 1950s relies excessively on extraneous props. Putting songs of Geeta dutt, mohammed rafi, hemant Kumar and Lata mangeshkar of that era in the backdrop is the easiest and laziest way to get the characters to “feel” the bygone era. I expected motwane to go further in his exploration of the theme of repressed love, but he seems to pull back at crucial turning points. when Pakhi’s lover deserts her on their engagement day, we don’t see Pakhi mourning with her doting father. we only hear her talking about it later. Sonakshi’s choked but dignified recrimination recreates unseen moments visually. yes, her performance is that vivid.

The film looks beautiful, yet comes dangerously close to skipping the soul, but for one clinching factor. Sonakshi Sinha. So far we’ve seen her as a mass-appealing queen of blockbusters. Playing the ailing, dying Pakhi in Lootera she comes to a formidable level of histrionic nirvana not obtainable to any of her contemporaries.

Sonakshi penetrates her character’s bleeding loneliness with fearless integrity.

There are sequences and scattered shots where Sonakshi is captured in various postures of unbearable vulnerability. In a sequence of rebuffed ardour, she drops her dignity and drives down to meet the man who suddenly starts avoiding her.

“ will you come tomorrow? day after? Then the day after that,” she whispers in declining hope when he refuses her invitation to come home.

It’s a moment of pleading love that reminded me of Shabana Azmi’s celebrated telephone sequence in mahesh bhatt’s Arth ranveer Singh, though able and alert in his responses, seems to rely way too much on looking vulnerable, charming and rakish.

Lootera depicts a doomed passion that is at once invigorating and terrifying. Tenderness trickles out of