Genre : Drama
Year : 2006
Director : Pankaj Parasher
Cast : Urmila Matondkar, Asmit Patel, Raj Babbar, Naseeruddin shah, Dimple Kapadia
BANARAS : A WANNA-BE DIFFERENT FILM FALLS FLAT !
All these reviews saying that it’s a “hatke” movie, that poor, innocent me got taken in. And no, I don’t mean that it is not “hatke” – it is, but whoever said that “hatke” was good ? I have 2 explanations for this disaster of a movie, either the director didn’t know what he was doing, or that he knew what he was doing but all that “mysticism” finally got to him. And the badly etched characters, daft dialogues, and atrocious acting didn’t help either.
Basically it’s the story of one woman’s journey through life. And you guessed it – full marks people – the woman is Shwetambari (Urmila), who transforms from bright, peppy, capri-clad (in Banaras ??), song-singing, bosom-heaving university student to all-knowing spiritual healer “Maa”. And the journey is ardous, for the movie-watcher. She on the other hand, prances her way through, submerged in love with lower-caste Soham (Patel), and then submerged in sorrow at his untimely death, subsequently leading to her distancing herself from her doting, upper-caste parents Mahendranath (Babbar) and his wife (Dimple). Of course seventeen years later, when “Maa” is finally ensconsed in Mauritius she gets heavenly visions of her father in his death-bed and must decide to visit Bananaras again . . .
As far as acting goes, Urmila does a shoddy job, quite a come-down from the “Pinjar” days. The less said about Asmit Patel the better. What was that expression on his face that he used in place of actual acting – the “I can’t act and the director doesn’t know better” expression ? I develop hives whenever I see Raj Babbar onscreen, but I’ll have to say that in this case he did fairly OK as Shwetambari’s father. What do they say about the land of the blind . . . Dimple who’m I consider a fairly accomplished actress, does not manage to breathe a glimmer of a spark into the under-developed role she plays. So, that leaves us with Naseeruddin Shah – the only actor in the entire film who acts and looks good doing it.
The story is to put it politely : uninteresting. OK, so Shwetambari’s morphing into some kind of semi-goddess, but why should I care ? Where is the effort to garner viewer interest, forget about viewer sympathy ? Character development is missing, so of course rooting for a protagonist goes out the window. And as open-minded as I am, I do need that the director present his story believably and with some hint of common-sense, especially when attempting a “hatke” movie. Urmila cavorting in tight clothing suddenly morphing to a religious icon is stretching the imagination a tad too much. Build-up and character development is neccesary in roles which attempt to present to us “supposedly” higher forms of knowledge. And this is so hideously under-done in Banaras that not only I, my dog didn’t believe Urmila either.
This is one of those films, where you think that the director is trying to do something good, but ends up losing his way big-time. The film has few redeeming qualities and music is one (the only one ?) of them. The film has very little entertainment value, I mean you can laugh at it, yeah, but that’s pretty much it.
Banaras, thus, is a definite no-no.
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