Singing in July

1) Parineeta (directed by Pradeep Sarkar): Rating 8/10

What does one do with the songs? With the exception of Sarfarosh (1999), I can’t conceive of giving a Bollywood movie a perfect rating if it has useless songs. And unfortunately, Parineeta does have some needless music numbers. That being said, the movie starts off amazingly. The crisp voice of Amitabh Bachchan (who else has such a voice?) introduces us to the vibrant city of Calcutta. The visuals are stunning in that opening sequence and all throughout the movie. The cinematography is spot on as the lens blur the characters we don’t want to see, and focus on the expressions we should be interested in.

The story is based on the 1930’s Calcutta novel which means that it is a love story about unrequited love and about upper class Indians laying around balancing their life between the leftovers of colonial India and modern India, while filling their time with some activity. In this case, the activity is music. Childhood friends Shekhar (Saif Ali) and Lolita (Vidya Balan) grow up to develop a very close and intimate understanding, and Lolita even helps to co-compose Shekhar’s music. But problems of jealousy arise when Shekhar’s father tries to get him married off to a rich girl and Girish (Sanjay Dutt) enters the frame. But surprisingly the ending is a happy one. All’s well that ends well.

The movie length is just 2 hours and 7 minutes but the few needless songs make it feel longer. The story is adapted to be set in the 1960’s but a few clothes are taken straight from modern day: did women wear short suits back in the 1960’s? I don’t think so. And Shekhar is showing wearing modern day sun shades and turtleneck sweaters. I know these are minor points but they stick out. The acting of all the main leads is very good with the only exception being the role of Shekhar’s mother.

Anyway much better than a typical Bollywood movie but not a perfect one though.

2) Les Choristes (The Chorus, directed by Christophe Barratier): Rating 7/10

The biggest problem with this movie is something which is not the movie’s fault – the story of a new teacher bringing the best out of an unmanageable bunch of kids has been used so much in Hollywood that it looks stale, even if the movie is in French. A teacher takes up a job in a boarding school where all the children are ill-disciplined and unruly. The school principle believes in an action-reaction method, meaning for every student’s violent action, there should be an equally violent reaction in return. The new teacher, Clement Mathieu (Gerard Jugnot) notices that this action-reaction approach will never solve the situation so he tries to reason with the students. He discovers that most students in his class have a talent for singing. So he takes up music again (he had vowed to forget music) to help find a way to better the students. The movie is very good on all fronts: acting, directing, music, editing, and cinematography. But the story didn’t appeal too much and after a while, it gets boring.