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Friday, April 26, 2024
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BOLLYWOOD RIBBON
EDITOR'S PICK
'Ribbon': Capturing rhythms of metropolitan life (Review By Subhash
K. Jha ; Rating: ***1/2 )
And then, something happens. Something awful and irreversibly life-changing
happens in this true life portrait of an urban marriage threatening to fall
apart under the strain of coping with daily vicissitudes.
Debutant director Raakhee Sandilya uses her two principal actors to mirror
metropolitan mores and meltdowns with masterful vigour and a scrupulous
authenticity. The camera is used not to accentuate or glamourise Mumbai's
suburbia, but to simply serve as a functional topography for the lives of the
couple Sahana and Karan played with such an absence of bravura and flourish that
we forget Kalki and Sumeet are playing characters who don't exist beyond the
film.
At least not in the way we see them here.
The authenticity instilled into the couple's lives is comparable with what Basu
Bhattacharya achieved with Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore in the remarkable
portrait of a marriage on the skids in "Avishkaar" 43 years ago.
Director Raakhee Sandilya's protagonists are not played by stars and one of them
has not been seen on the large screen before. Kalki and Sumeet penetrate the
lives of their characters with an incredible alacrity. No time is wasted in
bringing their lives as close to us as cinematically possible. We enter their
lives without fuss or ceremony and we leave them just as quickly, with no room
for farewells.
Sandilya strips the film of all vanity. There is very little background music to
highlight even the highest summits of emotions in the narration, so that we get
the feeling of an unpolished raw home video. Hurting and hurtful. Kalki plays
the more aggressive partner. And why not? Early in the plot (if one may accuse
this film of resorting to plotting devices), Sahana, well, she loses the plot
when her seemingly supportive boss turns wary and hostile after she returns from
her maternity leave.
The scenes of Sahana's workplace politics make us flinch. Yup, this is what goes
on when women workers get too big for their boots.
The sequences where the couple deal with their child's hired nanny abound in the
scent of lived-in familiarity. Every working couple silently suffers the
tantrums of its house help. "Ribbon" is a subverted upturned take on all the
family films we've seen in the 1960s and 1970s. If Jeetendra and Leena
Chandavarkar in L.V. Prasad's "Bidaai" were to set up home in Mumbai today, this
is what they would have to deal with.
If "Ribbon" was not such a sharply aligned slice-of-life story, it would be a
horror film, much in the same way that Daron Aronofsky's "Mother" is. It is
disturbing in its implied critique on the nuclear family where couples choose to
keep their parents out. The last 30 minutes of the film is a separate beast,
bound to serve up a wallop of shock disgust and despair in the audience as they
watch the couple's helpless attempts to keep their self-limited world from
falling apart.
A lot of the scenes between the couple seem so spontaneous and unrehearsed,
almost as if the lead pair walked into situations in the script that they had
inherited from a couple who lived there before them. "Ribbon" captures the
rhythms of metropolitan life with such a vehement repudiation of drama that I
often forgot I was watching fiction.
"Ribbon" has its share of flaws. So relentless is the focus on the protagonists'
lives that we barely get a glimpse into the lives of the other (interesting but
sketchy) characters, like Sahana's friend or Karan's father or the babysitter
who evidently leads a life as adventurous as her employers, if not more.
But that, some other time.
Actor Sumeet Vyas, who will soon be seen in upcoming web
series "Official CEOgiri", says he does not believe in distinguishing between
the digital platform and the silver screen.
"I personally, as an actor,
don't see any difference at all. The effort, which I need to put in a film, is
the same effort I put in for any other medium. The difference is the medium
through which the story is getting told and that's it," the actor, who also
appeared in films like "English Vinglish", "Parched", "Ribbon", told IANS here.
"As an actor, you don't really think if it is a film or a web series you are
acting for. You just act and give your 100 per cent.Read More
Actor Sumeet Vyas says Bollywood is like a local train, and he is struggling to find "a window seat in this crowded train".Read More
After a sudden pregnancy, a young couple discover that it takes a lot more than love to stick through all of life's knotty turns
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