There is something about Delhi 6…
Why do we love Ramayan love so much? Of all the factors that people can possibly come forward with, I’ve a relatively simple answer. We love Ramayana because of Ravan. Because, he distinctly draws that line. He writes it on the wall and declares which side he is standing. Now, that makes our job much more simple of where do we want to position ourselves. We need a hero, so that we may want to be like him. We need a villain so that me may stand on the opposite side of wall. Who the hell are we? Mixed vegetable hain sirjee. Thoda Paneer to thoda mutter.
Roshan( Abhishek Bachchan) comes to India to drop his ailing grandmother. He is flabbergasted by the loudness and madness, where every hour is a celebration of a celebration, where every minute is an event in itself. He neither loves it nor hates it initially, but, is rather fascinated by it. His Motorola cell phone connects him to a world never seen before. He is greeted by a host of interesting characters, who attaches a different meaning to every emotion experienced by him before.
There is not much of a story to boast about in Delhi-6, it is about the journey of protagonist, though to much disappointment, unlike Lucky, he reaches a destination. A forced one. In the first half, the flow of the movie is inconspicuous by its absence, there are sudden stoppages, hiccups, gathering and moving on again. It can be a bit uneasy as an audience to register this, but, since there is so much to show and talk about the Dilli, that the camera is just too busy doing the hopping business. There is just too much going on in the first half.
Mehra’s sense of subtlety, attention to details and metaphors makes it a delightful watch. But, when you have just basked in the essence of scene, Mehra comes back abruptly on to your face and takes care to spell it out. Why would one like to do that? For instance, take the beautiful conversation between Abhishek Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor, where the latter explains how he lost in love, and how desperately he tried salvaging it in whatever way he could. Kapoor’s one line seals it all, but, then, he explains himself again. One doesn’t even get the chance of reveling in that line before being explained like a 8 year old. Same for the fakir’s use of mirror, it was evident, but Kulkarni lectures about it unnecessarily. And these are not the only two scenes.
The music of the film, needless to say, is nothing but jaw dropping. Rahman. Period. Let’s move on. The dream sequence in Dil Gira Dafatan is nothing but amazing, but, after watching the movie, the standout song of the movie without even a speck of doubt is, Rehna Tu. Before watching the movie, I could almost imagine a Chupke Se kind of a treatment being done to it. But, after watching the movie, one realises that Mehra almost reverses the conventional treatment this song could have been meted to. And the lyrics makes perfect sense when viewed in that context. Mind Blowing stuff. Rehman, Joshi and Mehra killed me then and there. Drop dead. Watch the movie and experience the scent of these lines:
Haath tham chalna hi
To dono ke daye haath sang kaise
Ek daaya hoga ek baaiya hoga
Tham le haath yeh thaam le
And,
Mujhe teri barish mein bheegna hai ghuljana hai
Now, comes the most important part of the film. Climax. Rakeysh Mehra has a penchant of shockingthe audience, he just has to do it. He is not satisfied until and unless, he doesnt’ find anything out of the ordinary to end his film with. He almost killed a beautiful RDB with the garish climax, same happens here too. it seems Mehra is more comfortablele with the journey rather than the destination. In both the movies, the first two hours flows naturally, while in the last twenty minutes you can almost imagine Mehra scratching his head and thinking about the climax. Thinking too hard. It looks as if he comes up with a ’solution’ to a problem more than anything else. Almost analogous to a 5 paragraph model essay students have been ‘programmed’ to write in schools. Where is the fucking ‘conclusion’? Mehra wonders aloud. Why it has to be so forced? You may want to retort back. The last 15 minutes killed it. Almost. I say almost because because the first two hours is so damned well made that it would be atrocious of me to deride this movie. Logically, Maths does not allow me to do so. Nor does my conscience.
Tags: Abhishek Bachchan, Delhi 6, Rakyesh Mehra, Review, Sonam Kapoor
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
wonderful revu..
you have an eye for the structural details. seems to have grasped the artistic math of movie making.
yes i was also dissapointed by a forced climax in RDB.
even if a movie is meant to shock or changes course it should stem from the plot and not seem artificial as it usually the case.
keep up the good work
Excellent write-up !!!
GK
what motorola cellphone is used in this movie?
I have not read beyond first three lines of the review – not because I dont like it – because Delhi – 6 seems to divide people into polarized camps and I want to see the movie and choose the camp. However wish to point out the naivette of the argument that Ravan was a pitch black character who makes us easy to identify good and take sides in Ramayan. Ravan is the greyest when it comes to villains in an epic written anywhere. Please forget the Sagar Ramayan we have been fed and read the actual ramayan and make a decision on who Ravan really is.
Jaiganesh, I would surely like to know why is Ravan the ‘greyest’ character ever.
Mohit, Congrats! You got the essence of this write up. I write for people like you.
hahaha yes i would also like to know more about this ‘greyest’ness of ravan!
Nice write up tanul…almost felt the same.
Some on who watched this movie without looking too much into metaphors like mirror or Kaala Bandar,it was a disappointing film.As such I knew that it was the story of coming back to roots NRI stuff and expected the usual cliches and I was right,the usual no water in tap,warring relatives,middle class girl who do not want to get married and want to do something in life stuff,Hndu-Musilm brotherhood stuff,inspite of all this oft repeated things I still expected to see something new about Delhi but it was not to be.My main complaint about this movie is that it speaks of a subject which has been handled many times before,but then even if the subject is old wine in new bottle,at least u expect some good writing,something original that was not to be.But some scenes from this film impressed me like those Religious dramas,the way media was going mad about Kaala Bandhar and people’s exaggerated version of their encounter with Bandhar