Movie Update + Movie Review
Rituparno Ghosh and Aishwarya Rai will team up for the third time after the Bengali Chokher Bali and the Hindi Raincoat. The new Hindi film is expected to cast Ash as Shabana Azmi's daughter. "It's my third film in the mother-daughter trilogy after Unnishe April and Titli," said Ghosh.
Aparna Sen was all set to make her first Hindi film Gulel with Ajay Devgan and Saif Ali Khan but the project fell through with the two principal stars revealing a reluctance to go ahead with the film. Now the director is ready to make an English-language film. Titled 15 Park Avenue, the movie will feature her Mr & Mrs Iyer stars Rahul Bose and Aparna's daughter Konkona Sen Sharma. It's the story of two non-Bengali sisters living in Kolkata. Meanwhile, Tabu (not Konkana) is now doing Mira Nair's Namesake.
A UK-based NRI is set to make an English film on Congress Chief Sonia Gandhi and has started the search for an artiste to play the lead role. The film titled Sonia will be produced by Sunanda Murli Manohar, an NRI from UK, and is based on a book written by journalist Rasheed Kidwai titled Sonia - a biography. The film will be directed by Jagmohan Mundhra, who has made Hindi films like Bawandar and Kamala.
The film will be shot in India, Italy and the UK. Sunanda has already produced films like Indian Summer, Blood Stone and Tropical Heat. Her Ramji Londonwale is now ready for release.
Vinta Nanda's White Noise has become a hot bet in the festival circuit. After the Kara festival in Pakistan and the Florence festival in Italy, the film has now been invited for the Berlin festival.
Noted filmmaker Kundan Shah's latest venture Three Sisters, is based on the suicide by three unmarried sisters in Kanpur in 1988. Shah, who is well known for films like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron and Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, says his new film is not a docudrama, "but an artistic vision of creative realism".
Actress-singer Suchitra Krishnamurthy Kapur will probably have to wait for some more time before her comeback film with Anil Kapoor, Galti Se, makes it to the theatres. The Ram Gopal Varma film revolving around the story of a man who accidentally murders his wife, was shot in two versions, but the film has been held up.
MOVIE REVIEW
Black
Starring: Amitabh Bachchan, Rani Mukherjee, Ayesha Kapoor.
Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Now, this one's got real Oscar potential! For here comes a movie from Mumbai that creates a new idiom altogether and speaks in the universal language of cinema, one that transcends all spatial barriers. Anyone, anywhere, can connect to it. What's more, Black stuns you into silence, a silence that is overpowered only by the sounds of sobs.
There is art that enthrals, entertains, excites? and there's art that leaves you with a heavy heart. Of course, the film is ultimately a celebration of the human spirit, a story of triumph over tribulations but you are misty-eyed throughout. You soak the fluid, raw emotion, you become a part of the unspoken bond between a blind, mute and deaf girl and her teacher who etches on the stark blackboard of her mind a zillion words, expressions and images, and you identify as much with the helpless girl as with her able-bodied sibling who feels neglected.
Bhansali's creativity takes a quantum leap since Khamoshi, which also dealt with the travails of the disabled. You feel like giving a standing ovation to him for filtering even black through his unique prism of artistic vision, to produce so many hues. Be it the frame of a dining table cover in flames because of candles dropped unknowingly by the blind little girl or the vignette of grains of rice flying as the eccentric tutor battles to make a "fine young lady" of a tormented, violent girl, the director never once loses his touch and infuses beauty and visual splendor into the film just as he did in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas. Besides scenic opulence, there's also that musical cadence which is the hallmark of all Bhansali's movies.
There are moments in the film which move you to rare heights: Bachchan's attempts to tame the raging eight-year-old (an absolutely superlative performance by young Ayesha Kapoor), his first connection with her, his first serious stroke of Alzheimers. Bhansali is indeed lucky that he got his Debraj Sahai in Amitabh and Michelle McNally in Rani. Without these two brilliant artistes, the director's vision would have remained just a dream.
Watch Black to experience emotions you may have never felt before. A must-see for all cinema buffs across the world.
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