SMALL FILM WITH BIG HEART

Bioscopewala

STARRING Danny Denzongpa, Geetanjali

Thapa, Adil Hussain and Tisca Chopra

Director: Deb Medhekar

HHHHH

The last time I saw the grossly underused Danny Denzongpa in a central role, it was in the Bengali lm Lal Kuthi. Danny was a powerhouse of volcanic eruptions in this forgotten lm.

Signi cantly, Bioscopewala, which blessedly offers Danny a chance to be at the helm, is all about regret, guilt, almost-forgotten memories and the magical power of nostalgia to invoke the purest form of desire which comes only to those who know how to give unconditional love.

From the very outset, Bioscopewala lodges itself into the recesses of our parched hearts. With its artless, freewheeling audacious adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s deeply moving story Kabuliwala, the lm sets up a wistful picture-perfect world of regret and heartbreak.

The fragility and yet the miraculous permanence of a relationship that grows between an Afghani migrant Rehmat Khan (Danny Denzongpa) and a little girl Minnie (played by the wonder Miraya

Suri) recalls Ashok Kumar and Sarika in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Aashirwad.

I was afraid of what the relationship would look like in the present-day context of sexual predators stalking every corner of India. It was a different world when the great Balraj Sahni befriended and bonded with little Minnie in Bimal Roy’s Kabuliwala

But an aging Afghani man bonding with a 5-year-old girl in the 1990s?

First-time director Deb Medhekar tears through all cynical readings of Tagore’s classic story to tell us that the age of innocence is never over. There is always room for compassion and camaraderie, no matter how low the moral aspirations of a civilisation falls.

Medhekar, in a script co-written with Radhika Anand, oozes tenderness and empathy in every frame. Every moment is magical, every tear drop worth treasuring. A sizable portion of the lm’s aesthetic astuteness is attributable to Rafey Mehmood’s cinematography.

Mehmood makes every frame a vista of reined-in emotions. There is certain restraint and temperance in the storytelling, rarely seen in lms about human relationships.

Here is a lm that is as beautiful in feeling as it is in appearance. And no small gratitude for this gem of a treat to the performers.

Seasoned actors Tisca Chopra, Adil Hussain and Geetanjali Thapa pitch in with uent performances. But it is Danny who stands tall in a role immortalised by Balraj Sahni. He is at once virile and emotional, child and man, yin and yang. He sweeps the character’s inner world into his own

With John Abraham playing the rebellious anti-establishment hero hell bent on doing right no matter what the cost, the lm reads more like a Hollywood cop thriller than a faithful chronicle of India’s nuclear makeover in the deserts of Pokhran.

While sections of the lm get unbearably jingoistic, towards midpoint the plot gets absurdly ‘espionaged’.

An immoral spy (who, it turs out, becomes the lm’s most interesting character) from Pakistan named Sajjan snoops into our hero’s hotel room in Pokhran, plants an eavesdropping device and gets Ashwat’s wife to suspect him of in delity.

Sadly, it all seems highly improbable and manipulated. By all means, honour the country with ag-waving patriotism, but at least make sure that the lm does not prove unworthy of its nationalistic aspirations.

Subhash K. Jha

persona to render a character that Balraj Sahni and Bimal Roy would have recognised.

As for Rabindranath Tagore, I can see him being a bit confused by the liberties taken with his story. But then life as well as art is subject to constant re-interpretations. Who knew this better than Tagore?

Subhash K. Jha