Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Natural, unconventional, enchanting...

When you think about movies these days, all that you get to see is a horde of movies with not-so-original plots, same old love-hate-revenge kind of stories, stereotypical melodrama and a painful overdose of the likes of "Himeshs-Salmans-Emran Hashmis" ! So naturally, it was utterly refreshing to get a sweet surprise with a masterpiece, with a fresh storyline and a powerful screenplay underlining nuances of unconventional human relationships.

I am not talking of a brand-new movie or anything but a fairly old one that I chose to see a couple of days back: “Mr. and Mrs. Ayyar”. I am guessing many must have seen it long back but here I explain what I found incredibly exciting about the movie.

These days when they show relationships in movies, we get to see only the usual, mundane boy-meets-girl kind of romantic relationships, or father-son, mother-son relationships, or the ones of a platonic friendship between colleagues, or just a plain villainous hate between enemies. But life is so much more complex. Real life does not stick to these stereotypical relations. Many books often bring out such unusual, delicate, complex relationships which cannot be labeled by a particular name. But movies rarely make an effort in this direction.

This was the most appealing thing about the movie for me. Well, two strangers brought together by a situation is not a new thing, neither for movies, nor for books. What is original about the plot is the complicated relationship between the two. A married Tamil Brahmin woman with a child and a young Bengali muslim man. Situation forces them to pretend to be a married couple. This is not a story with artificial twists and turns trying to make things interesting. It’s a story wherein the very situation and the way the two react to it make it enthralling.

Apart from this most important factor, a lot of the film’s aura is also due to the way it is made. Niceties of various situations and that of human nature are really well brought out. Things seem to be well thought out (to the smallest detail) while making the film. For example the pronunciation of a certain words as it should be from a woman of Tamil background is strikingly effective. Often, it is a convention that the central characters get the most of the screen presence at all times. But while describing a situation to the detail that is intended in the story, the film-maker makes sure that the aforementioned usual convention does not hinder the storytelling itself. Acting, dialogues, diction only add to the overall enchanting experience and at the ending scene of the movie, you are left spellbound by the overall impression that it creates on your mind...