LAST LEAR;random thoughts
this is not a review, just random thoughts/ rants and a question]
Absolutely nothing could spoil THE LAST LEAR for me.
Not the failed alarm clock in the morning due to which I woke up just about 25 minutes before the show started, not the irritating cabbie who messed up the road delaying me further, neither my wallet which was left back home and surely, surely not the sight of an half empty theatre.
I remember being dragged to the cinema by my parents some nine years back when BARIWALI released, remember sitting there bored to death and disturbing the hell out of others. Obviously time has passed since then, tastes have changed. The nine years has not only lead me to understand the masterpiece that the film is, but also turned into one of my favorite film, one of the very few Bengali films whose DVD I still put into my player occasionally on a Sunday afternoon. I guess it would be fair enough to assume am a rituparno ghosh fan, and being that maybe am a little or a lot partial to him, rather incapable/unwilling of finding flaws in his work.
Ghosh’s Last Lear following into the theatres after his rather commercial attempt with “KHELA” is the story of Harish Mishra an ageing Shakespearean actor long retired from the stage, it is a film about his world, his act, his aggravation as he waits for the curtains to rise one last time. From the initial frames Ghosh slowly brings us to his world, a world rather dramatic, egotistical yet self-effacing but never for once pretentious. From the very beginning Ghosh almost purposefully shut us indoors, be it the scene inside the car where we watch as the diwali lights flash by on the windows, or Harry’s house which from the very start gives a sense of claustrophobia, a feeling of being shutoff despite of yourself. Maybe that’s the reason why the climax shot in the vast open spaces and the scene where Harry teaches Shabnam to let herself go and shout across the mountains seem such a relief to the characters and the audience alike. The film can boast of some of the finest art direction and cinematography in Indian cinema, every shot, almost every scene is framed to perfection.
Almost all of Ghosh’s films had strong female characters, who have almost always dictated the film, here too its preity zinta, divya dutta and shefali shah who remains the pillars of support, holding up the film and Harry’s character to the audience. Shelfali shah delivers which unarguably is one of the finest performance in Ghosh’s films falling in the same league as Kirron kher in Bariwali and aparna sen in “unishe april”.
Commenting on performances would remain incomplete without talking about Harry, aka Amitabh Bachchan. Stating exactly all the things the viewer feels while watching him on screen is beyond the scope of any article, it’s an act which needs to be seen in order to understand its effect, it needs to be seen with an un-objective eye. The performance needs to be applauded rather than scrutinized. Here is an actor, pushing 65 and still not only on the top of his game but continuing to push the boundaries further. I wondered when was the last time we saw an actor with such screen presence on our screen. As the lights in the room darkens and theatrical music starts beating, as Harry’s room momentarily turns into a stage, one similar to any other countless one’s in Delhi, Bombay, kolkata where he once performed and he breaks into recitation of a passage from tempest, one cannot help but feel humbled, grateful even… at witnessing what can we safely proclaim as a performance which would have even satisfied the Bard. YES it is over the top, very dramatic and it was supposed to be that way.
I guess many would have a problem with the reasons given in the film on why Harry left his greatest love, theatre. Why he decided to do the stunt himself, many will point that it was just not shocking enough, it was sort of lame. But in reality, without giving away any spoilers it was the perfect reasoning and sums up the story better than anything else could have. Its very subtle as is typical of Ghosh, one familiar with his cinema would know that he never makes a strong statement or puts forward his views through his characters shrieking it out.
I saw the film for the second time today, this time taking my mom along and came out feeling stimulated and highly satisfied, a satisfaction matched by very few films in the recent past. Only one little thought lingered around my mind, disturbing my sense of fulfillment, one surely not connected with the film but with the audience or should I say about the lack of an audience.
Kolkata, the so called city of “intellectuals”, a place where people still admire literature, music, cinema and arts but still no one turns up when a work of true art is for the showing. Few months back I was like many others at the Bergman film festival at inox and to my astonishment it was going houseful for all seven days of the festival. Such a pleasure to find people still admiring the works of these old masters here. The same is with the kolkata film festival every year, attended by numerous people, clamoring over each other on the ticket counters to watch their favorite films. I wonder who they are and where exactly they go in for hibernation? Its urgent and we need to find them fast, drag them from their hiding and ask them, if you are so starved for good cinema, why not come out of your hiding and support it? Why stay back home predicting the doom of Bengali film industry, instead of coming out to fill the theatres.
Tags: "bengali cinema", Amitabh Bachchan, audience, Preity Zinta, Rituparno Ghosh, Shefali Shah, the last lear
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
well written rick.
i saw the movie yesterday and in same conditions..
loved it…i liked the way it ended as well…
one of AB’s best performance…..
equally well supported by others …..
i agree with most of ur views
i don’t know rick.. here’s what striker had written in that gem of a post on pappu and pappi..
“..
Pappi
You need to watch Faronofski’s and Bieslowski’s films. Drool worthy.
Pappu
You really love those foreign and independent filmmakers, don’t you?
Pappi
What’s not to love? They re-define cinema man. Unlike these Bollywood jerks churning out trash after trash.
..”
maybe not in the exact context of that article.. but
Kolkata has a lot of these pappi’s i feel..it has always had… don’t give much of a chance to things closer to home.. absolutely idolising the idea of liberal thought..and getting SO non liberal in looking for it’s sources..
@ANKUR
you are partially right my friend, kolkata didnt always have these “pappi’s” but it surely do now, its almost like we are breeding a whole new alternative generation of pappi amongst us.
the worst part is we ourselves often start behaving like these pappi’s without even being aware of it.
maybe it’s a matter of whatever suits the context and seems comfortable.. i myself have not been as liberal as i would like others to be..
Last lear…not bad… nothing special… strictly OK…
The movie just didn’t do anything for me. It is not that I look for spectacular impact every time I watch a movie but then again it should not be as listless and staid like watching a lava lamp for two hours. I found nothing to write home about about bachchan’s acting, that drunk scene was almost embarrassing. Though I thought the women acted well. And that’s about it – oh and well the pop corn was especially good yesterday.
except AB the whole movie sucked for me
@Rick…went to catch this film on the weekend with a lot of expectation…have seen most of Rituparno’s films multiple times…the dialogues didn’t have that Rituparno touch (which his Bengali films have)…also the Shakespeare lines seem to be put in without much of a thought as to why those lines need to be there…if you have seen Asukh (40% of the dialogues in the film are lines from Tagore, but for once I didn’t have this feeling with them)…Amitabh’s delivery of the lines also didn’t have that effect on me which I desired…in fact i had difficulty in understanding the later part of most of the Shakespeare dialogues…i wish i saw someone else (for e.g. Naseeruddin, Soumitro) in the role…
sorry for a typo in the above comment “but for once I didn’t have this feeling with them”…should read…”but for once I did have this feeling with them”
@RAM
i guess you should have gone in without the popcorn for this movie, would have helped
but i guess when a movie doesnt connect to you it juts doesnt. one cant help it, not your fault.
personally i thought the drunk scene was SUPPOSED to be embarrassing for both arjun rampal and the audience to watch, so if you found that so then the director succeeded
@ARIJIT
so nice of you to mention ASUKH, most people look over that film. indeed one a later thought the dialogues could have been a touch better, natural if i may say so. but that just might be due to ghosh not being used to writing dialogues in English as such.
am not really that educated on Shakespeare to comment on whether the dialogues were appropriate for the situations or not.
soumitra would have indeed been a very good choice for the role, but i guess the film needed a superstar for harry, and ghosh might have also envisioned harry as a larger than life character so AB might have seemed perfect to him.
somehow i cant really see naseer saab playing harry. he would have surely pulled it off brilliantly but as i said the role needed a larger than life persona.
@papai
when you go ahead and say a movie sucked outright then you don’t really leave any scope for anyone else to give an explanation, but then again as i always say if i film doesn’t work for you then it simply doesn’t nothing can help it.
Probably I’m completely overstepping my self-defined limit of awe and jaw-dropping wonder when i see a sticky piece of art. But after watching ‘Last Lear’, i have decided to abolish that limit, and get real. There will be visuals and people, I’ve told myself, who will force your finger on the Eject button every now and then, and there is nothing you can do but… get ejected. And i feel elated that such visuals and people can still be manufactured in our country, esp. in a state where it was always in abundance once.
Just when I was languishing in the thought that the same old Kolkata middle class household and an egotistical society (this time called the filmwallahs) are set to clash yet again… a scarily listless looking Mr Bachchan cornered in a silent crevice of his own room, barked out in uncharateristic homophobic glee and broke my stupor. The Eject button had been pressed, and I was irretrievably launched into the movie’s universe without so much as a feeling left for my environment or wife or friend (whom I had met after 3 years).
Thence, throughout the cold warmth of Siddharth and his pursuit, the mesmerising hurt eyes of Vandana, and the lost & pretty Zinta, the story & its telling took me by suprise every now and then, and the semi-full theatre hall intermittently broke out into laughter at the brief moments between Sid & Harry, Nurse & Vandana, the CCTV & the unsuspecting ‘John’ie.
And i agree wholeheartedly with Rick that AB’s was ‘an act which needs to be seen in order to understand its effect, it needs to be seen with an un-objective eye.’ And a theatre trained eye please, if I might add. Ghosh’s Amitabh is not Desai’s, Mehra’s or Verma’s or even Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Amitabh. Because he is not the filmy Amitabh, he’s an Amitabh picked up from the stage, who unfortunately most of us are unaware of. It was Amitabh (as Harry) reliving his KMC Delhi & Kolkata theatre days, the days spent with Utpal Dutt (the king of Shakespearan Tragedy onstage and probably te only other person that I can think of if one had to contemplate a replacement for Amitabh in this role). Mr Bachchan is unfathomable, egotistical, drunk & seeped in his theatre and his Bard in a way that only Theatre people can understand. Ghosh catches ‘the actor’ unawares on the verge of dereliction & exile, and introduces him to the camera.
And thus delivers a masterstroke in irony, because for us, what he has actually achieved is – put the camera’s favourite Bachchan onstage! Bravo!
And for those who didn’t understand or get the meanings of what was being said when he was reciting, please allow ofr the actor’s age and ego which was clearly painted, and the fact that we don’t speak that language any longer.
So, excellent piece Rick – it made me think again about the moments I enjoyed in the movie, and am planning like you, to catch it again. And unlike last time, I will try and have all the popcorn.
There are definitely moments in the film but they remain just so- stray moments- the CCTV bits for example. The images and the art are first-rate..
But as a film, it’s a mish-mash, trying to be too many things and all over the place… at the end, I was neither moved nor left with a lingering excitement that creeps in after watching or reading something that bowls you over. And I don’t think that was the intention of the film. I went with my mom and her reaction too was – “ya, it was okay!” Overall, it was a staid film, quite listless and the characters, I thought, were left quite unconnected to each other (and I don’t mean the urban angst/alienation sort of unconnect. There was, I felt, hardly any emotional connect amongst the characters and their angst and that, I think, was unintentional)…
Several moments were forced and there were too many places I went – “Okay, so what?” and “Now I can switch off”…
Don’t blame people for crowding at the Bergman festival and giving this one a miss… yes, the theatre was near-empty…
it seemed like a harried film with harried characters fumbling around (mostly unintentionally and unconvincingly), and a film that was put together in a hurry at the edit table…
Too bad!!…
I thought Amitabh was way over the top – as is his wont these days. The movie was ok.