I remember we were once told in scriptwriting class that you begin to notice all the technical aspects of a film (the cinematography, editing and what have you) when the story fails to hold your attention. It is quite the opposite with me. Nothing distracts me from bad story-telling. And so I have nothing to say about the cinematography, the acting, the Bengali literature/culture references and whatever else Lootera has got praise for.
I must say I loved the first five minutes of the film. The way it opened, the play (was it Ramayan?), Sonakshi Sinha relishing it with child-like joy, and the first foreshadowing of her illness. Then her father, the zamindar decides to tell her a story. Cue in a 'let me tell you a pariyoon ki kahani' type background music for a barbaric story about a king being betrayed and his parrot (which safeguards his soul/life) getting beheaded. It might have worked in an ironic way but that sadly wasn't the intent.
Varun's character encompasses all possible human traits. He starts off being a little bit of an introverted, shy, hulk of a man. He looks nervous around Pakhi, not because he is afraid of being caught, but because she's a woman. He looks doomed and brooding when she's not around. When we see him in the latter part of the film, it might as well have been a different person. He is suddenly all man. Pakhi's character I liked. Her's had the most economical exposition. Very well done. I know she's a protected, indulged child in like five minutes! Now, if she is the apple of her father's eye, why would he consent to her marriage without any background check done on the boy? Varun saying he is orphaned isn't enough. (Raanjhanaa and Lootera and beginning to sound similar!)
I had no clue Varun wasn't who he claimed to be, so when that information was revealed it was unexpected. But I didn't feel half as bad for Pakhi as I did for her father when Varun dumps her and cleans out the treasury. He left that poor man with NOTHING but heart ache (literally :)) all because it would have been improper to tell his adopted uncle no. When Pakhi confronts him with a 'So your mama/chacha was more important to you than me,' he deflects the answer in the lamest way possible: "You are rich, grew up in mansions, what do you know?" As with Raanjhanaa, here too I found the protagonist's actions beyond redemption or empathy.
Varun's two decisions, one to stand up to his uncle and get married to Pakhi, and two, to run away the next morning were without external provocation. I am doing the film a favour by ignoring the chacha landing up there and giving him a veiled threat, because 1. Varun had no reason to feel threatened. Whether his chacha tells Pakhi's father 'his asliyat' or Varun ditches her, Pakhi was bound to find out the next morning. But submitting to the chacha meant Pakhi found out his true colours in the saddest of ways, and 2. Varun later claims he ran away on the day of the wedding out of loyalty to the man who bought him up. So the uncle didn't have to threaten him. That scene was to make Varun seem like he was being forced by a malignant force to act against his wishes but that could hardly be the case. It just occurred to me that it is representative of the very thing I blame the writer (s) of: using outrageous character actions to avoid cliches. In the hands of a less aspiring writer/director, Varun's uncle would have threatened to cause Pakhi great harm should Varun go ahead with the marriage. And so Varun leaves Pakhi for HER good. Cliched yes, but I'd actually have preferred that for the logic it lends Varun's actions thereafter. This is a long explanation for a scene I planned to ignore :) So if Varun was forced to leave Pakhi to protect her, this might have become the epic love story they were going for.
Next, there was no trust built between the two for it to be broken. The scene when she has her attack in the car and he has to inject her with her medicine was well-directed, but under-used. And it certainly was cute when Pakhi yells at him for saying no to her, but that means she's in control of the relationship not he. The film is about trust being broken and then re-built. But, where was the trust gained in the first place? I get that Pakhi's character was drawn up to be childlike-trusting. She falls for the new archeologist because he is new. It is sweet but it makes me less sympathetic towards her. Like I said before, I felt a lot more for her father than her... which is okay I suppose.
Moving on, as Varun does quite happily... we enter the dark, sombre second half. Varun lands up shooting his friend, accidentally, sure, but he was trying to kill someone nonetheless... a police officer doing his job, to be precise. And what was he saving? His own bloody skin. And this killing changes our bumbling, spineless non-hero into a raging, righteous, full on testosterone hero. He comes barging into Pakhi's house and demands to know how dare she inform the police! He even pulls out the very same gun on her and her help. The justification for his anger is that he did not realise that his previous actions resulted in the death of the Zamindar. Like breaking a poor girl's heart and robbing her father blind aren't enough reasons for her to call the cops on him.
Pakhi gives back as good as she can (there was a rediff review about how their noses in this scene reflect their inner turmoil which I found really amusing. But perhaps it is true. Just that I never noticed how their noses were framed). There is one weak attempt to call the police and after that she doesn't bother. He proceeds to squat in her house... again to save his ass. See what I mean by outrageous character actions? Now that Varun's male-ness has made an appearance it refuses to go away. He thunders through the house, grabs her at will, huffs and growls and is absolutely nothing like what he was earlier. And it isn't that the earlier version of him was an act. He was only pretending to be an archeologist. The tenderness, bewilderment and love was all his own. I guess the writers felt that if Varun returned to her cowering and pitiful, what story would have been there left to tell? I think there was. Changing his character just for some conflict or chemistry is silly.
Then, out of nowhere, Pakhi whose character was so well-defined, goes all nuts about a tree outside her house. It isn't even like her favourite tree or anything. If they had at least shown her to be superstitious earlier, or if, say, when her father dies she notices that the tree outside her house had no leaves, or something, I'd have been able to understand her obsession. The thoota (parrot) tale isn't the reason, unless there was an edited scene following that in which Pakhi believes she is going to die and her father tells her that she can never, because he locked her soul in their Dalhousie guest house walla tree. So this tree-obsession was a force fit from The Last Leaf. (And what a silly girl it makes her too. Doesn't she understand the concept of winter and spring? Leaves fall means tree dead? Tu-tut.) She is too much of an adult to believe in rubbish like that, and too much of an adult for us to not argue with. Varun listens to her, nods along and immediately gets to the task of painting yellow leaves (nice touch though, the colour).
Let's assume Pakhi's belief in her life being tied to the tree's leaves is convincing for us and Varun... But the last 30 minutes, which was the The Last Leaf adaptation, missed the whole point. The Last Leaf was about a selfless sacrifice. The old man downstairs (who was a painter and looking to make his masterpiece) had no reason to go through such lengths for a child, but he does. He doesn't do it every night either, because that is just plain stupid. Couldn't you find a more solid way of fixing the leaf that didn't require you to climb up every night? How about fixing more than one leaf? And what if the leaf fell during the day? Who is to tie the leaf after he dies? What makes him think that after he leaves, she will stop believing in this stupidity? See, The Last Leaf is based on a child's irrational fear and builds to the climax on a stormy night. When you read The Last Leaf you are convinced that the next morning there will be no leaf, and you fear how the child is going to react to it. In Lootera there was no such anxiety. And in Lootera it wasn't sacrifice as much as it was redemption. He owed it to Pakhi to save her life.
Which brings me to my biggest grouse: the lack of surprise in the act of sacrifice. The reason we remember The Last Leaf as well as we do (I do at least) is because the sacrifice took us by surprise. Here Varun owes it to her. Where is the surprise if his inner world is thrown wide open to Pakhi and us. For at least an hour he labours through his redemption in full public view. He is no kind stranger. He stays with Pakhi and helps her through her illness. Hence the leaf-tying act was diluted. It is the only thing she doesn't know about him, but that can hardly surprise her much. To contrast this, what if he everything he did in the second half was without her knowledge?
Imagine that Pakhi does not see Varun at her guest house, but he does. He finds out what harm he has caused her by running away on their wedding. He gets a chance to skip town, but how can he leave this poor, sick girl behind? She unwittingly has become his responsibility. Little acts of kindness turns up at her doorstep without her knowing who is responsible for them. All alone and unwell, she looks forward to this invisible stranger's gifts. The police tell her to look out for Varun and she is more than willing to. The jerk ruined her life. Varun hears about her crazy obsessive belief in the tree. Every day he watches the leaves fall with fear. What can he do? The night of the great storm. Pakhi stands at the window just as Varun steps out. They both see each other. She might be dying, but she owes her father this: She telephones the police. Varun knows what she might have done, but doesn't run away immediately. What he has to do wont take more than five minutes he reasons. But, as always, he underestimated painting. It takes him all night.
Pakhi makes peaces with the fact that she is going to die, but at least the man responsible for her grief is not going get away with his crimes.
The morning-after she looks out and there, to her shock, is a leaf still holding on. She doesn't step out or anything melodramatic. She turns in her bed and goes to sleep. There is peace on her face. Varun, of course, dies at the hands of the police and not because he asks for it (by pretending to have a gun). He runs, tries to escape. He wants to live, why shouldn't he want to? The police shoot after the running man. He dies. Maybe I don't like suicidal people. That's the other thing about The Last Leaf... the painter wasn't exactly keen on dying. Makes his sacrifice bigger, if you ask me.
Lacing the O Henry story with the fall of the Bengal Zamindar was a good thing but it only lent itself atmospherically to the film. I did not know anything about that time in our history, so it was initially very interesting... especially since we watched it from the zamindar's point of view. I liked how beautifully the sense of loss, that fall from power permeates the post-interval part. I feel that the writers had a great Zamindar story that they tried to marry to The Last Leaf. But two wonderful stories don't an epic make.
On a side note: How random was the Sonakshi and Ranveer's scene with the 'Kya likh rahi ho'? Was it to give us that (to repeat the same word) epic feeling. The VO in the trailers felt like they were trying too hard and in the film the exchange was quite random. She pulls out her diary to write, if memory serves right, just after they've made love. Was reference to her writing a hat-tip to Charulata?
I must say I loved the first five minutes of the film. The way it opened, the play (was it Ramayan?), Sonakshi Sinha relishing it with child-like joy, and the first foreshadowing of her illness. Then her father, the zamindar decides to tell her a story. Cue in a 'let me tell you a pariyoon ki kahani' type background music for a barbaric story about a king being betrayed and his parrot (which safeguards his soul/life) getting beheaded. It might have worked in an ironic way but that sadly wasn't the intent.
Varun's character encompasses all possible human traits. He starts off being a little bit of an introverted, shy, hulk of a man. He looks nervous around Pakhi, not because he is afraid of being caught, but because she's a woman. He looks doomed and brooding when she's not around. When we see him in the latter part of the film, it might as well have been a different person. He is suddenly all man. Pakhi's character I liked. Her's had the most economical exposition. Very well done. I know she's a protected, indulged child in like five minutes! Now, if she is the apple of her father's eye, why would he consent to her marriage without any background check done on the boy? Varun saying he is orphaned isn't enough. (Raanjhanaa and Lootera and beginning to sound similar!)
I had no clue Varun wasn't who he claimed to be, so when that information was revealed it was unexpected. But I didn't feel half as bad for Pakhi as I did for her father when Varun dumps her and cleans out the treasury. He left that poor man with NOTHING but heart ache (literally :)) all because it would have been improper to tell his adopted uncle no. When Pakhi confronts him with a 'So your mama/chacha was more important to you than me,' he deflects the answer in the lamest way possible: "You are rich, grew up in mansions, what do you know?" As with Raanjhanaa, here too I found the protagonist's actions beyond redemption or empathy.
Varun's two decisions, one to stand up to his uncle and get married to Pakhi, and two, to run away the next morning were without external provocation. I am doing the film a favour by ignoring the chacha landing up there and giving him a veiled threat, because 1. Varun had no reason to feel threatened. Whether his chacha tells Pakhi's father 'his asliyat' or Varun ditches her, Pakhi was bound to find out the next morning. But submitting to the chacha meant Pakhi found out his true colours in the saddest of ways, and 2. Varun later claims he ran away on the day of the wedding out of loyalty to the man who bought him up. So the uncle didn't have to threaten him. That scene was to make Varun seem like he was being forced by a malignant force to act against his wishes but that could hardly be the case. It just occurred to me that it is representative of the very thing I blame the writer (s) of: using outrageous character actions to avoid cliches. In the hands of a less aspiring writer/director, Varun's uncle would have threatened to cause Pakhi great harm should Varun go ahead with the marriage. And so Varun leaves Pakhi for HER good. Cliched yes, but I'd actually have preferred that for the logic it lends Varun's actions thereafter. This is a long explanation for a scene I planned to ignore :) So if Varun was forced to leave Pakhi to protect her, this might have become the epic love story they were going for.
Next, there was no trust built between the two for it to be broken. The scene when she has her attack in the car and he has to inject her with her medicine was well-directed, but under-used. And it certainly was cute when Pakhi yells at him for saying no to her, but that means she's in control of the relationship not he. The film is about trust being broken and then re-built. But, where was the trust gained in the first place? I get that Pakhi's character was drawn up to be childlike-trusting. She falls for the new archeologist because he is new. It is sweet but it makes me less sympathetic towards her. Like I said before, I felt a lot more for her father than her... which is okay I suppose.
Moving on, as Varun does quite happily... we enter the dark, sombre second half. Varun lands up shooting his friend, accidentally, sure, but he was trying to kill someone nonetheless... a police officer doing his job, to be precise. And what was he saving? His own bloody skin. And this killing changes our bumbling, spineless non-hero into a raging, righteous, full on testosterone hero. He comes barging into Pakhi's house and demands to know how dare she inform the police! He even pulls out the very same gun on her and her help. The justification for his anger is that he did not realise that his previous actions resulted in the death of the Zamindar. Like breaking a poor girl's heart and robbing her father blind aren't enough reasons for her to call the cops on him.
Pakhi gives back as good as she can (there was a rediff review about how their noses in this scene reflect their inner turmoil which I found really amusing. But perhaps it is true. Just that I never noticed how their noses were framed). There is one weak attempt to call the police and after that she doesn't bother. He proceeds to squat in her house... again to save his ass. See what I mean by outrageous character actions? Now that Varun's male-ness has made an appearance it refuses to go away. He thunders through the house, grabs her at will, huffs and growls and is absolutely nothing like what he was earlier. And it isn't that the earlier version of him was an act. He was only pretending to be an archeologist. The tenderness, bewilderment and love was all his own. I guess the writers felt that if Varun returned to her cowering and pitiful, what story would have been there left to tell? I think there was. Changing his character just for some conflict or chemistry is silly.
Then, out of nowhere, Pakhi whose character was so well-defined, goes all nuts about a tree outside her house. It isn't even like her favourite tree or anything. If they had at least shown her to be superstitious earlier, or if, say, when her father dies she notices that the tree outside her house had no leaves, or something, I'd have been able to understand her obsession. The thoota (parrot) tale isn't the reason, unless there was an edited scene following that in which Pakhi believes she is going to die and her father tells her that she can never, because he locked her soul in their Dalhousie guest house walla tree. So this tree-obsession was a force fit from The Last Leaf. (And what a silly girl it makes her too. Doesn't she understand the concept of winter and spring? Leaves fall means tree dead? Tu-tut.) She is too much of an adult to believe in rubbish like that, and too much of an adult for us to not argue with. Varun listens to her, nods along and immediately gets to the task of painting yellow leaves (nice touch though, the colour).
Let's assume Pakhi's belief in her life being tied to the tree's leaves is convincing for us and Varun... But the last 30 minutes, which was the The Last Leaf adaptation, missed the whole point. The Last Leaf was about a selfless sacrifice. The old man downstairs (who was a painter and looking to make his masterpiece) had no reason to go through such lengths for a child, but he does. He doesn't do it every night either, because that is just plain stupid. Couldn't you find a more solid way of fixing the leaf that didn't require you to climb up every night? How about fixing more than one leaf? And what if the leaf fell during the day? Who is to tie the leaf after he dies? What makes him think that after he leaves, she will stop believing in this stupidity? See, The Last Leaf is based on a child's irrational fear and builds to the climax on a stormy night. When you read The Last Leaf you are convinced that the next morning there will be no leaf, and you fear how the child is going to react to it. In Lootera there was no such anxiety. And in Lootera it wasn't sacrifice as much as it was redemption. He owed it to Pakhi to save her life.
Which brings me to my biggest grouse: the lack of surprise in the act of sacrifice. The reason we remember The Last Leaf as well as we do (I do at least) is because the sacrifice took us by surprise. Here Varun owes it to her. Where is the surprise if his inner world is thrown wide open to Pakhi and us. For at least an hour he labours through his redemption in full public view. He is no kind stranger. He stays with Pakhi and helps her through her illness. Hence the leaf-tying act was diluted. It is the only thing she doesn't know about him, but that can hardly surprise her much. To contrast this, what if he everything he did in the second half was without her knowledge?
Imagine that Pakhi does not see Varun at her guest house, but he does. He finds out what harm he has caused her by running away on their wedding. He gets a chance to skip town, but how can he leave this poor, sick girl behind? She unwittingly has become his responsibility. Little acts of kindness turns up at her doorstep without her knowing who is responsible for them. All alone and unwell, she looks forward to this invisible stranger's gifts. The police tell her to look out for Varun and she is more than willing to. The jerk ruined her life. Varun hears about her crazy obsessive belief in the tree. Every day he watches the leaves fall with fear. What can he do? The night of the great storm. Pakhi stands at the window just as Varun steps out. They both see each other. She might be dying, but she owes her father this: She telephones the police. Varun knows what she might have done, but doesn't run away immediately. What he has to do wont take more than five minutes he reasons. But, as always, he underestimated painting. It takes him all night.
Pakhi makes peaces with the fact that she is going to die, but at least the man responsible for her grief is not going get away with his crimes.
The morning-after she looks out and there, to her shock, is a leaf still holding on. She doesn't step out or anything melodramatic. She turns in her bed and goes to sleep. There is peace on her face. Varun, of course, dies at the hands of the police and not because he asks for it (by pretending to have a gun). He runs, tries to escape. He wants to live, why shouldn't he want to? The police shoot after the running man. He dies. Maybe I don't like suicidal people. That's the other thing about The Last Leaf... the painter wasn't exactly keen on dying. Makes his sacrifice bigger, if you ask me.
Lacing the O Henry story with the fall of the Bengal Zamindar was a good thing but it only lent itself atmospherically to the film. I did not know anything about that time in our history, so it was initially very interesting... especially since we watched it from the zamindar's point of view. I liked how beautifully the sense of loss, that fall from power permeates the post-interval part. I feel that the writers had a great Zamindar story that they tried to marry to The Last Leaf. But two wonderful stories don't an epic make.
On a side note: How random was the Sonakshi and Ranveer's scene with the 'Kya likh rahi ho'? Was it to give us that (to repeat the same word) epic feeling. The VO in the trailers felt like they were trying too hard and in the film the exchange was quite random. She pulls out her diary to write, if memory serves right, just after they've made love. Was reference to her writing a hat-tip to Charulata?
1 comment:
I liked what you've written.
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