|
|
Thursday, April 24, 2025
|
|
BOLLYWOOD THE FILM EMOTIONAL ATYACHAR
EDITOR'S PICK
Rating: ** ½
Every character in debutant director Akshay Shere`s funny, bitter and violent
ode to the road movie wants money. Sometimes they also crave for sex. For
example, there`s this incidental character (the film has drug dealers,
racketeers and criminals crawling out of every frame) who`s force-doped by Ravi
Kishen, who is very at home playing the revved-up psycho.
The zonked-out sociopath asks Kishen, Koi launadiya milegi, kya?
You hope for his sake he never runs into Kalki Koechlin. There is one very smart
and manipulative woman in this wicked and wacky road movie. Koechlin seems to
enjoy herself playing the woman on the run… She ain`t no nun.
And boy, does she have fun! She is the casino-owner Abhimanyu Singh`s mistress.
But happily gets kidnapped by the extortionists Ranvir-Vinay duo (yes, they are
back together again!). Then when she runs into Mohit Ahlawat and his backseat
wealth, she snuggles up to him as though she was Marilyn Monroe on speed.
Speed is paramount to the mounting tension in Emotional Atyachar.
Everyone is in a hurry to get to the end of the road. Short-cuts are most
welcome. The characters range from the strange to the deranged. This is
quintessential Quentin Tarantino territory soaked in the oozing blood of Vishal
Bharadwaj`s storytelling.
Add a dash of cruel humour -- for sintance a fat man dying on the backseat whose
friend, played by Jimmy Viryani, cuts open an artery while trying to remove the
bullet. And you have a work that gets its target audience charged up and ready
to go.
A hurried impatient narrative edited with brutal austerity, Emotional
Atyachar is not every one`s cup of tea. Really, one doesn`t see people
rushing for this strange tale of blood, gore and vendetta situated in the
greyest moral zone of the modern wounded civilization.
While the screenwriting (Bhavini Bheda) and dialogues (Kartik Krishnan, Bheda)
are quite often funny in a weird and quip-friendly kind of way, the performances
are uniformly engaging. Ravi Kishen and Abhimanyu Singh are the pick of the lot.
But the unknown theatre actor Anand Tiwari, who makes the mistake of offering
the wounded Ahlawat a lift on the deserted Goa-Mumbai highway, and who plays the
only morally conscious character, is outstanding.
The plot is self-consciously complicated. The wheelerdealers who swish in and
out of the plot charting a bloody course are not quite the people you want to
meet at a party let alone on a deserted highway. They don`t seem to know the
knack of quitting while they are ahead.
Fortunately, the film does.
