Review:Lootera is an absolute masterpiece
Lootera is a gorgeous, gorgeous film,
one that uses its period setting affectionately, with loving detail, and
not exploitatively, as our cinema is wont to do, writes Raja Sen.
"Once upon a time."
Those are four magic words, four words that promise us the world, adventure and romance and fantasy and drama. The starter's pistol to any fairytale, they offer up immediate escape: "a time" is never now, you see, and we're instantly whisked away from the humdrum of our everyday.
Our imagination, like a suddenly alert hound, perks up its ears and begins to underscore even ordinary narratives with flourishes the narrator never spells out. With those four words in place, anything can follow.
Vikramaditya Motwane understands this well, which is why his masterful adaptation of a classic O Henry story, nearly a hundred years old, begins with a father caressing a daughter with far older folklore.
As the ailing daughter listens, the story snaps a character's neck, and the bassline in her head begins to thrum. Lootera makes it crystal clear right from the start that it is an old-world tale -- one involving buried treasure, no less, and rhymes about lizards and rats -- and then, with its sleeves rolled up, begins to enchant.
The film opens gently, with a cough. The girl is a writer, the daughter of a Bengali zamindar -- naturally she'd have studied at Shantiniketan? That's what the boy rightly assumes, popping into her path as an archaeologist, but now shoehorned into her service as an art teacher. He pretends, she indulges, and one thing leads inevitably to another until we come thudding across to that heartbreaking finale we inaccurately thought we'd braced ourselves for. _______________________________________
Sify Movies:
Critics Rating: 4/5
A beautiful 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 and burst at the
seams with unspoken feelings. There are long passages of muted lyricism
in the narration 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 magical 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 sweaty bustling
Kolkata and forlorn snowy Dalhousie, both shot with fetching
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. Motwane takes on the theme of sublime love, but seems to
pull back at crucial turning points. When Pakhi's lover deserts her on
their engagement day, I wanted to see Pakhi mourning with her doting
father. But no. 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 films looks beautiful but 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. Pakhi's desire to find adventure, love and
romance reminded me of Madhabi Mukherjee in 1964 film "Charulata".
There are moments, 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 telephonic sequence in Mahesh Bhatt's "Arth". Playing a girl
who falls desperately in love with an unworthy man, Sonakshi takes her
character through a journey that we see unfold with geographical
precision before our eyes. She has great support in creating a memorably
tragic character from the film's crew. She is often captured looking
with agonising vulnerability into a distance where she can see no hope
of redemption. It's a portrait of frightening desolation that reminded
me of Shabana Azmi in Mrinal Sen's "Khandhar".
Ranveer Singh, though able and alert in his responses, seems to rely way
too much on trying too look vulnerable, charming and rakish.
"You are not Dev Anand," Varun's friend (played effectively by Vikrant
Massey), tells him sardonically to dissuade Varun from getting close to
Pakhi.
That, in essence, is the tragedy underlining the cast factor. The role
needed a Dev Anand for us to believe that a rich, beautiful girl like
Pakhi could be completely and irrationally swept off her feet by the
unworthy stranger.
The second movement of the plot moves into a moody snowcapped doom.
Here, Motwane again makes use of long passages of intense silences to
punctuate the feeling of desperate passion. There is also a 'thriller'
element in the Dalhousie segment of the story that doesn't quite blend
into the finely woven fabric of pain, passion and tragedy. The sequences
in the isolated snowcapped home between Ranveer and Sonakshi hiss
crackle and burn up the screen with their pent-up passion.
"Lootera" depicts a doomed passion that is at once invigorating and
terrifying. Tenderness trickles out of every pore of this beautifully
crafted saga of a love so infinite and so forbidden that it seems to
scoff at cruel fate and brutal destiny while carving out a craggy jagged
path for the lovers.
Vikramaditya Motwane's storytelling is like a coiled twirling stairway
to the heart of his irreconcilable protagonists. The film's muted
silences suggest a deep connectivity between pain and love.
Sadly, in the midst all the underlying conflicts, poor O. Henry's story
is almost forgotten. O. Henry leaf-leitmotif shyly shows up at the end,
making a hasty entry not too convincingly.
"Lootera" is a flawed gem filled with moments of glorious emotions. The
storytelling shows the hands of a masterly visionary who tends to dither
in moments of deep drama.
But then there is Sonakshi Sinha, who makes you forget all the blemishes in this unforgettable tragedy.
