No, this isn't a poster from the recent Mani Ratnam flick Guru (official site). I just thought this picture was kind of cool. I was quite high when I watched this film. There was a dance sequence like this in the beginning of the movie, performed by Mallika Sherawat.This is really not a review in the conventional sense. Despite being quite high, I was able to register the theme and generally follow the storyline. I must say I was quite surprised by what I saw. Be forewarned though, I can not guarantee what follows will not spoil the movie for you. Just to make this warning foolproof:
SPOILERS AHEAD
A few scenes that registered strongly in my mind, apart from the one I already mentioned. There was a scene in which the Guru character is about to skip town (or village or hamlet if you prefer), leaving behind his newly wed wife. Now, I don't know many men who would leave behind a spouse who looks like Aishwarya Rai. The Vidya Balan kissing scene, strongly performed.
I checked out the buzz on the internet.
A certain socialist blogger didn't like the item number since it wasn't filmed in Gujarat. Someone ought to tell her that large portions of the movie was shot in Karnataka. Also, her favorite Anjaani Anjaana was shot in Fisherman's Cove which is nowhere near Calcutta, where the film Yuva was set. A western critic likened the movie to Citizen Kane. Another western critic called Guru the most interesting movie ever made about polyester. The People's paper resented Mani Ratnam's departure from his left-leaning stance. A southern commie paper claims the Ash-Abhi engagement had an opportunistic timing, just before the release of the film.
The remarkable thing about Guru is that this is perhaps the only mainstream movie ever to come out of India which depicts the process of wealth creation in such a positive light. Added to the fact that it was made by arguably the most mainstream of directors (Ratnam is said to have invented item numbers), this is a real milestone. Come to think of it, all we had so far in terms of strong personality were gangsta flicks. Businessmen have always been protrayed in the worst possible stereotypes. In the seventies when a gentleman businessman was something of an absurdity, he would always be the owner of the neighborhood Kirana shop. He would be partially bald, paunchy, mustachioed and a known miser. This gentleman would then attempt to molest the lead female character. In the later decades the sophisticated businessman came in. Only now he was a smuggler. In any case, these characters were never central to the story, which would invariably be about its middle class protagonists and their chasing of a mediocre dream. In recent times, somewhat more realistic portraits of industrialists bring out their darkest side. For instance the movie Corporate. There is no redemption in the movie, business and morality do not mix. They don't even touch each other on the fringes. Businessmen as shown in that movie are promiscuous, have no regards to consumers. They bribe ministers and have no qualms about getting close family members killed. To top it all, all of them have all these evil characteristics in equal proportions!
Guru changed all that, in one fell sweep. Capitalism has almost a starring role in that movie. There is no ambiguity about where the director's sympathies lie. A young man from a remote town (or village or hamlet, if you prefer) dares to dream and boy, does he dream big! Loosely based on the life of the late business tycoon Dhirubhai Ambani, the movie is an indictment to the soullessness of the socialists. It also exposes what an absurd regime we had in those days. Basically you couldn't carry out any economic activity without running afoul of the law. How in the hell were these socialists hoping to feed the country? By singing Raghupati Raghava non-stop? I read somewhere recently that the top bracket marginal tax during Nehru's time was as much as 98%. That's exactly how you end up with 300 million hungry dalits and OBCs.
The Guru character did take ample liberties with the law and these were shown. being a shrewed director Mani Ratnam intersperses these with the Vidya Balan scenes so that we are constantly distracted. He also whitewashes the sins with an ancient Indian trick. You see, in India you just need to elevate a person to the level of a demigod. Hence the rather curious title - Guru. By the end of the movie, the Guru character is already a God. This dilates the believability and morality nerves in the Indian public. You can safely end the movie on that note.
The popular success of the movie makes me optimistic that perhaps the moral default of socialism no longer holds true. To paraphrase the tagline of the movie, people are beginning to realize that dreams do not come true in a socialistic economy.
3 comments:
BarbarIndian,
It would not have been so palatable to the samaajwadis and marxwaadis, if Gurubhai had not been a villager but instead were the scion of a wealthy industrialist. Say, the character is modelled on Aditya Birla rather than Dhirubhai Ambani. Even then, the usual critics would point out that Dhirubhai wasnt clean, etc. But then , the fact that he would never have had to dirty himself if the system were clean, would be lost on them.
Expect the leftists to hijack the theme of the movie, as in how a villager can become successful in a license-quota-permit, socialist raj. (See we never were independent, its all an illusion. Maayajaal. We just shifted from the British raj to secular-samajwaadi-nehru-gandhi-sycophancy-corruption raj)
am still in the first paragraph
"SPOILERS AHEAD" around the corner leaves a bit ..u know!
a)u find that poster cool? it looks like something that's made out of frozen junk material...there's this ice-maiden with divine looks trapped in a frozen format for eternity and here's man whose hand & leg muscles are frozen with something ambiguous...inch closer to see that look of discomfort tucked in that woman's eyes
b)ugh..was that a kiss?Vidya Balan & our own Madhavan? I prefer a kiss of death to this!
badly done n executed kiss.Mani is losing his grip over things between man & woman...
more soon! but I protest,why dont u respond to female commentators?u just ignore their comments ..why so?a clear-cut pattern is emerging like what we get from ACNielsen trackin systems ..
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