Cinema fascinates, provokes, inspires and entertains more powerfully than any other media. Shaaditimes seeks to understand and interpret human relationships in all its nuances.
What better way to explore these intricacies than reviewing films that explore the agonies and ecstasies of human relationships?
If you too want to review any such film please do send it in to the editor.
Yatra
Producer: Bipin Vohra
Director, Story, Screenplay, Cinematography, Editor: Goutam Ghose
Featuring: Rekha, Nana Patekar, Deepti Naval
A movie with an intense message
Very rarely these days, do we encounter movies that are made because the maker has something to say. Rarer still is the power of that message. In those terms, Goutam Ghose's
Yatra is cinema; more than just a movie.
Yatra is an intricately structured treatise, which aims at exploring multiple subjects under broader themes, which includes change, transition, the creative process and above all the dimensions of reality. All characters, situations, events and motivations centre around the exploration of these themes along with a variety of necessary sub-texts that they demand.
Yatra revolves around Dashrath Joglekar (Nana Patekar), an acclaimed writer of Hindi literature who is caught between the vagaries of his creative process. Literary ghosts of his past work haunt him in his future tales and both converge to make a surreal statement of his life. It is through this statement that the director explores sub-texts of a growing consumerist and material society, constancy of change and the terms of reality as we understand and experience it. The question on the existence of Lajwanti (Rekha) itself is a remark meant to extrapolate the intensely spiritual and unexplained nature of the creative process. The central protagonist of Dashrath's literary work '
Janaza ' Lajwanti, a doomed courtesan becomes the symbol of the journey and changes that not only the society but also the writer himself is going through. That journey finally ends in an infinite spiritual destination for the writer but within terms that are considered decrepit in the practical world.
The independent themes are full of brilliant potential for significant exploration. But their seamless fusion makes for a more evolved cinema that force one to stop and think. Literary symbols and filmmaking motifs abound in the visual telling of the stories of the protagonists. At one point, though the film does seem pointless and meandering, especially when one knows that the premise offered is based on surrealism, a fusion of fact and fiction. The writing of the film is strong in its clarity between symbolic and factual representation of the larger messages. But it falters endlessly in character-creation (especially of Dashrath's family and even Lajwanti) and pace. Another flaw in the screenplay is that it never fully satisfies the audience in hearing the story of '
Janaza ' or watching the life of Lajwanti either. The 'critical' discussion between the young filmmaker and the celebrated writer throughout the emblematic central journey of the writer that leads the film to its denouement is an unsatisfactory cerebral exercise for the audience. That may take away a lot of the film for the lesser intellectually oriented audience, who wish to experience rather than think.
