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Thursday, April 25, 2024
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BOLLYWOOD SOUNDTRACK
EDITOR'S PICK
Rating; ***1/2
Hear this. DJ Raunak loses his hearing ability and gets to hear the voice of his
conscience. Great premise for an onscreen human drama? Debutant director Neerav
Ghosh, with incredible support from his leading man Rajeev Khandelwal, creates
an engrossing defence of anti-hedonism.
Excessive self-indulgence is dumb. It can also make you deaf. So says the film`s
well-crafted screenplay. The message is driven home with a refreshing absence of
self importance.
A lot of the film`s drama, if not all, is derived from Canadian film It`s
All Gone Pete Tong released six years ago. That film`s inspirational
thrusts are transferred with fluency and virility into Ghosh`s art attack on the
wages of excessive pleasure-pursuit.
Paul Kaye, who had played the lead in the original film, had delivered a
pitch-perfect loss-of-hearing gain-of-soul performance. Khandelwal goes beyond
the exigencies of his character in search of his lost character`s tortured soul.
In the sequences where he comes to terms with his deafness, the actor brings to
his face and physique the unmitigated anguish of a man watching himself topple
over the edge.
It`s a brilliant performance, by far the best male performance this year.
Whether it`s the body language of a wild DJ partying the nights away in a haze
of alcohol, or sharing those tender moments with Soha Ali Khan (cute, gentle,
sensitive and effective), Khandelwal`s face maps out the character`s tormented
flight into terrifying stillness.
Playing a man who watches his life spin out of control, the performance could
have easily toppled over the edge. It holds.
The director uses a fabulous soundtrack. There are startling rock ballads
punctuating Raunak`s voyage into the damned. Old songs like Yeh jeevan hai
iss jeevan ka yehi hai rang-roop or, for a beautifully crafted romantic
interlude between Rajiv-Soha in the park, Khullam khulla pyar karenge hum
donon are used to endearing effect.
The narrative moves in three predictable but pulsating sections.
Raunak`s descent into a hedonistic hell, his shattering deafness and, best of
all, the redemption that he finds through a haze of self-loathing as he takes
flight into a world of idyllic love (a touch of Guru Dutt`s Pyasa in
the end when Raunak simply vanishes from the world of ruthless self interest) --
for a first-time director, Ghosh displays remarkable control over his scattered
material on his shattered protagonist.
Admittedly the storytelling device (well-known real-life DJs and VJs are roped
in to talk about `Raunak`) is borrowed from the Canadian film. But what the
hell! Nothing in life is original. Not heaven not hell. Not pleasure, not pain,
and certainly not art.
The absence of over-sentimentality and the self-mocking humour applied to
Raunak`s predicament imbue a wealth of mellow maturity to the storytelling.
Yup, Soundtrack gets it right. In telling the story of a man who
stops hearing the world outside to finally start hearing his own inner voice,
the film`s strong sense of drama and redemption are comparable with the cinema
of Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
Soundtrack is a soul-stirring tale of a musician`s voyage into
deafening hedonism and a quiet redemption.
The director suffuses the soundtrack with snatches of a music that transports a
fairly routine inspirational story to the sphere of a modern moral fable.
As for Khandelwal, his performance is so accomplished that he proves, not for
the first time, that he`s among the most engaging actors today. For the money,
time and attention, he is the true rock star.
