The film tells the story of two young people living in Mumbai. Amit works in an office, writes songs and dreams of bringing back the girl who left him for another. Samara is a dancer who dreams of making a creative career. She has a complicated family history and personal life. Their fates intersect periodically, but will anything come out of this - that is the question.
She asked me to see the film and evaluate it in the context of Western culture, because she didn’t know much about it. Hence the choice of evaluation criteria.
To begin with, I want to say that for all the “westernness” of the shooting and the manner of storytelling, the duration is not very (or very not) Hollywood. 2 hours and 20 minutes, as a rule, allow themselves blockbusters, award-winning films and harsh art-house directors, to whom the devil is not his brother. It's a lot of melodrama. However, by the standards of Indian cinema, this is not enough.
I imagine India either from films that look like real life, like ... a movie about life, or from literature that is either spiritual or describes how everyone lives in terrible poverty on the streets, or it is British literature in which the colonizers are just in India. They might as well be in Thailand, the country is still the background.
I have never seen such a middle class. It was informative. I'm just worried that maybe it's the same middle class as in the modern Russian comedy à la Christmas tree 3, where a 10-year-old girl tries to influence her mother with a million likes on Facebook. Samara's life clearly looked like this. Then it became clearer, but in the beginning it was very strange - the mother drinks and does not work, she only dances and then quit, and apartments with a view, as not in every five-star hotel! But Amit is typical.
It is interesting to see the difference between our cultures. They are both grown-up kids, they work themselves, they have some kind of personal life, but they live with their parents, and in that culture this is normal. That is, the cinema is similar to the Western, and the characters behave in parts of the Western way, but some traditions just can not break.
Speaking of tradition. The reverence of the parents was so noticeable! Samara could not tell her mother that she was an alcoholic, although it is so obvious, and Amit agreed to an engagement that he did not want! For young people, this is a little wild.
There are traditional (again) songs and dances in the film. Many of them are not bad, but the way the main character dances, I did not like it. Here's Amita's ex-girlfriend in the scene where he sang the song, just spinning around and looking organic and beautiful. But the main character's style is standard to the obscene, Western manner and aggressive sexuality, but the soul and character behind it is not visible.
With acting, too, everything is ambiguous. The actor playing Amit turned out to be some sort of finished image. He's not Cumberbatch with a storm of emotion in his eyes, but he's not quite a log either. It's clear what he was trying to convey. But the actress didn't impress me. For me, the image of the heroine did not work out, although she had good moments. She has more facial expressions than the guy.
All this is well shot, the dances and songs are inscribed in the plot, so they are not annoying. They have a problem with the script. There are many, if not superfluous, then aggravating scenes in it. And in Indian cinema, it's a novelty, but for the West, the story of connected fate is a bit of a cliché. There is a lot of the most interesting submitted from the same “House by the Lake” to “Cloud Atlas”.
And the question of why and what all this was about is very acute. If the director tries to show that the characters are perfect for each other, he failed. Ideal for each other in the movies – this is a letter to you with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Shared interests, mutual understanding, similar values, etc. These comrades have in common, except the desire for a creative life and codependent relations with their parents, is not visible.
If it was just to show the lives of city dwellers, then Samara is a strange example. It is not normal for India to be the daughter of a rich man's mistress. The life of this generation and their relationship with their parents? Well, this is better, but then there is not enough real drama and too much “entertainment”.
Office plankton life? What's Samara doing? Creative lives? Well, maybe, but then there's definitely a lot of extra.
If the author wanted to say something, I didn’t understand him. And I cannot shake the vague doubt that to the Hindus, who live in the cities themselves, this looks very "glamorous" and implausible.