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Film:
"Yatra"; Cast: Nana Patekar, Rekha, Deepti Naval and Nakul Vaid;
Editor, Screenplaywriter, Cinematograper & Director: Gautam Ghose;
Rating: ** This
is the story of a creator's journey. It could be seen as a metaphor of
the fairly prolific director's own journey across the oscillating
oceans of the motion picture. And never mind the rough patches and the
debilitating turbulence.
Gautam Ghose, who spearheaded the
avant-garde movement in the cinema of the 1970s, has never been too
comfortable with making films in Hindi, though he did make that
masterpiece "Paar" - describing the metaphorical journey of an
impoverished couple, played by Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi,
across a river with a herd of pigs.
Piggish behaviour we see in plenty in Ghose's new Hindi film and some of it comes from the protagonist himself.
Dashrath
Jogelkar (Nana Patekar) is one of those bull-headed writers who sees
himself as a harbinger of socio-cultural change even as his own
domestic domain disintegrates in front of his cynical eyes.
Many
of Dashrath's responses to the world around him are so naпve in their
apparentness you wonder if Ghose shares his protagonist's incredulity
at the consumerist takeover of the middleclass or whether he would like
to keep himself distanced from Dashrath's obstinate disregard for a
social structure outside the domain of his imagination.
The
ceaseless debate between the creative forces and the brute force of the
reality outside the imagination is not fully harnessed in "Yatra".
In
spite of some lucid camerawork (Ghose himself) there's an unfinished
though fascinating aura to this modern somewhat suspended rendering of
the Devdas tale shifted to a domesticated domain and driven by a
cultural diversity that often borders on chaos.
In one sequence
we hear Dashrath listening to classical music, his son (Romit Raaj)
playing the drums, wife (Deepti Naval), a portrait of indignant
docility, immersed in the kitchen sounds and the rain outside splashing
in to the domestic din.
This is a quasi-gone-corny classic
rendition of Ghose's treatise on cultural confoundedness as perceived
through the eyes of a self-righteous creative artiste, who thinks the
world isn't good enough to accommodate his fertile faculties.
This
intriguing jigsaw about the life of the imagination moves through two
cities Hyderabad and Delhi. The characters appear to belong to a
no-man's land and the train journey that Dashrath takes with a
filmmaker-fan (Nakul Vaid, hardly there) seems more symptomatic of the
writer's inner perplexities than a manifestation of the journey that
takes man from his imagination to an indeterminate spiritual
destination.
Expectedly, Rekha provides the most inspiring
moments, and not just for the besotted protagonist. Having played the
doomed tawaif (prostitute) innumerable times, Rekha can do the fallen
women act by heart. And she does.
There're some graphic scenes
of sexual violence with an uncouth Hyderabadi zamindar, and a breakdown
sequence at the end when Rekha pulls out all stops. Here's an actress
for whom less is definitely more.
The rest of the cast including Nana, who has the author-'wracked' role, goes from profound emotion to keen disinterest.
There's
an uneven quality to the narration, brought on partially by the
proclivity to cram in a surplus of ideas on the moral and cultural
downslide of a civilisation that has lost its balls and bearings.
Stagnancy
is the underlying idea governing Ghose's hazily mystical journey across
a mind that sees only anarchy around itself. There're moments of
self-defeating social comment...
The sequence where Dashrath,
the writer, imagines himself as suicidal farmer from Andhra Pradesh
hanging from a tree (farm fatale!) diminishes the scope of the
characters and their canvas into an amateurish morality tale.
And
yet for all its creative failings there's no denying the power and
strength of Ghose's ideological comment. The last lap of the journey,
when the writer-protagonist vanishes from his social duties to spend
time with the fallen woman, who is transformed over a period of time
into an item girl, is like a cauldron of simmering ideas brought to a
boil by a slow burn.
A more fast narrative and a less verbose
style of presentation - the dialogues often border on pulpit polemics -
would have gone a long way into making this journey more emblematic of
the excursive enthusiasm of a creative mind than symptomatic of the
malady that inflicts avant-garde filmmakers from the 1970s.
Ghose hasn't been able to make a smooth transition from anger and indignation to tolerance and introspection.
"Yatra"
is "Paar" without the adventurous spirit or the metaphorical
reverberations. Frigidity marks the rigidity of the creative artiste
who dies in a kotha rather than at the doorstep of his family.
By Subhash K. Jha, Indo-Asian News Service
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