Sajjanpur is a Class Apart
Print
Spoilers- You might not want to read if you are planning to see the movie.
Before the movie started, I saw the name ‘Mahadev Ka Sajjanpur on the Censor Board Certificate (?). Probably the distributors didn’t like the original name, I thought. Did anything else change in the movie because of commercial pressures, I wondered. We will come back to that later. I went to see the movie with a sense of trepidation as I had seen the promotional trailors and didn’t like any of them. I had thought that the humor would be too loud and in your face. But I was pleasantly surprised.
Director Shyam Benegal wields a masterly narrative and lets the viewer find the irony and satire in the movie if he pays heed. He starts us off on the deep end as Ramsingh authoritatively played by Yashpal Sharma tries to defend his wife from a murder charge with a story spin on a rape incident. As Mahadev nods his head dutifully, we are let known immediately by the director that though the issues which might be discussed in the movie might be serious, the treatment is not going to be. Benegal keeps this promise throughout the movie by avoiding serious melodrama at every turn with only one exception where Munni Bai played magnificently by Ravi Jhankal makes an impassioned plea to Mahadev to write to the collector to provide protection to him from Ramsingh and his goons.
Shreyas Talpade in keeping with the director’s vision underplays his role excellently in spite of bearing a most complex character seen very rarely in Hindi Cinema. Mahadev is meek and subservient to Ramsingh, not by choice but because of his worldly knowledge. He knows right from wrong but is also practical. Vote for Munnibai, he says to his mother, but don’t tell anybody. He is almost a villain as he is tempted to break up Kamala’s (played competently by Amrita Rao) marriage in his own love for her but redeems himself in the end when he realizes that she already has a better man than him for a husband. He should be angry being an educated man lacking a decent job or a wife which he might feel entitled to but is shown to be ever smiling and helpful. Talpade keeps his emotions on a tight leash even in the heartbreaking scene when Kamala is perhaps going to leave his life for ever.
Benegal continues to eschew melodrama for flippancy. I wonder if he might have wanted to end the movie at the railway station when Kamala leaves for the city but even when he seemingly ties up the threads in the story he lets us know that we may keep whichever ending we want. Except that we couldn’t have it all our way. If we want Ramkumar and Shobharani’s love story to end happily we couldn’t have Munnibhai’s political success. And if we wanted Munnibhai’s track to succeed, we would have to accept that something else somewhere will have to go horribly wrong. Make your choices- it’s a democracy, he seems to shout, but it will still stink.
More evidence where Benegal shows his class as a master storyteller. Mahadev’s mom is present in so many scenes where she just has a penetrating or perceptive look or two. Benegal never takes the pain to unravel the mother-son relationship to us except the odd remark where the mother is concerned about the village taking advantage of her son’s good nature. When a jubiliant Kamala discovers her dream of leaving for Mumbai coming true , she is still completely unaware of Mahadev’s affections but the director places his mom right in the same courtyard. Is she able to fathom the goings on in her son’s heart? Mercifully, Benegal lets the mystery be and that for me is enough to make the point about ‘Welcome to Sajjanpur’ being beautiful cinema.
Shantanu Moitra’s music complements the movie with a touch which doesn’t scream out for attention but blends in aided by the thoughtful placement of songs at decent intervals. He gets his opportunity to make his mark with the song ‘Munni ki Baari’ which probably will never be played or sung outside the confines of the movie hall but is nevertheless a brilliant gutsy decision by both the director and Moitra to have the whole piece played out in the movie.
My only grouse is with the cinematography and I can’t understand how the movie with such sub par shot taking got made under Benegal’s watch. I don’t understand camera work all that well technically but as a viewer I felt that it was too close for comfort. It panned a lot, following somebody’s motion or the other and gave me a blurry feeling. I thought the colors were too bright and it had a look and feel of a badly made 80s teleserial. Unfortunate that, but otherwise a wholly satisfying experience of being under the wand of an expert storyteller.
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
A very satisfying experience indeed.
loading...
I just saw the film today and I agree with most of the things you have mentioned here. Even I was left unsatisfied with the cinematography, but apart from that and some of the obvious commercial pressures Shyam Benegal must have been facing, I liked the film quite a bit. I especially liked the performances, which were very well designed and the overall tone of the film.
loading...
Yes, agree with you D&C. I thought the mother knew his son’s heart-ache in that look that passes between them after Kamala runs out happily. That look of concern and pain I took to be as her way of empathizing with her son even though they had a largely un-communicative relationship.
I have lots of issues with the shot-taking and I blame it on suspected budget constraints more than anything else. It makes the film look downright tacky! That and the art direction. Somehow, wasn’t the village too neat and clean?
For me the best performance was Illa Arun’s! What a blasting performance man! She made me actually love silly superstitious women. Though of coure Ravi Jhankal came close next.
And yes, a very well-written piece.
loading...
Gotta agree with most things. Glad to finally see an appreciative piece on the movie as most people seemed to be knocking it with the reason being you can’t expect such cinema from Shyam Benegal. My only grouse was that a couple of the slow numbers dragged a bit. But what a nice little film overall.
loading...
Just caught this movie yesterday. I would not call it a classic or a gem, but all the same, it still is a pretty decent flick. The characters and the rustic dialect, were really good. I guess the dialect was what you would hear in villages of eastern UP. Also the digs at the criminalization of politics. Regarding Munnibai’s case, it did happen in real, i think there was this small town in MP, where a eunuch was elected. Main thing is the downright tacky shot tacking, not expected from Shyam Benegal, and also that dream song with flowing curtains and those Yash Raj style dresses, geez. If that was meant to be a dig at the dream song sequences in Bollywood movies, did not work for me. The performances were really good, and the best part of the movie. Shreyas Talpade seems to be turning out into another Amol Palekar or Farooque Sheikh, the ordinary guy next door, with whom you could emphathize. Ila Arun, Divya Dutta, Yashpal Sharma, Ravi Kishen were all good, though i would rate Ravi Jhankal as Munnibai, the best. Also whats up with Kunal Kapoor, why is he wasting his talent in these kind of 2 bit roles? All in all, a decent flick, and one of the better movies of this year.
loading...
@Fatema
Not sure if budget constraints can be the excuse for poor photography? I am sure we have all seen competent works under similar constraints. I mean you can take Benegals’s previous films…
@Ratnakar
Somehow I don’t share your high regard for Kunal Kapoor
…he looks hot but what else has he got…haven’t seen much to like…
loading...
Kunal Kapoor didn’t spoil the role, especially when Mahadev goes to meet him in Mumbai, it took me a second to gather that Banshi is played by Kunal, his role was treated like a normal role, spared of any spotlight that the recent movies put on cameos.
Villages were conspicuously missing Colas/Mobile Companies’ advertisements that we usually see painted on the walls! :D
To me, a real painted board on the building of the publisher in Allahabad would have worked better instead of that small flex board in front of the building, it looked so unnatural!
loading...
can somebody tell me something about the guy who wrote this movie? ashok mishra (correct me if i m wrong)…i thought the dialogues were earthy,really funny with subtle sarcasm …this kind o language can only be found nowadays in litrature of harishankar parsai etc…great work
loading...
@Niren : It is Ashok Mishra who wrote the screenplay and dialogues for W2S. This is 2nd film with Benegal the first one being Samar.
He’s also the guy who wrote for Nasseem starring Kaifi Azmi and Mayuri Kango – grand father and grand – daughter duo. THe film explores their relationship against the backdrop of communal tension in Mumbai. I liked this film for both of these 2 chracters.
Bawandar (Jug Mundhra and Nandita Das is the other film he has written the screenplay for.
loading...
thanks for the info…thats volumes may b less but diversity is awesome…i think WTS belongs to Ashok Mishra…and he is a man to lookout for in this industry starved for versatile and original writers
loading...
awesome movie…no doubts about that…some of the points that you made were quite good..specially about two endings being shown(in an indirect fashion) and displaying the fact that we cannot have everything going in our favour…this really is a classic…
Shreyas Talpade was always a class apart..even in dor he added amazing humour in a very serious movie..hes the best(by far) among the recent crop
loading...
I liked Ill Arun’s performance the most. She carries it honestly. I mean i didnt think for a moment while watching her that she is someone else and acting like villager. I loved her
after Mandi.
I had problems with the narrative, same stories could have been interwoven with more complexity. but one resolves after another. dont understand the purpose. I saw a good comedy based in small village with a entirely different subject, portraying unique characters of true indian village which is Umesh Kulkarni’s ‘Valu- The Wild Bull’. I would prefer Valu to Sajjanpur. The comparison is because of the genre and same canvas.
loading...