A moving master-stroke!
Mayank Shekhar FILM: GURU DIRECTOR: Mani Ratnam ACTORS: Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Mithun Chakroborty Mirror Rating: * * * * Vidya Balan plays a fatally ill, wheelchair-borne girl in this film. She is the daughter of an idealistic newspaper owner (Chakroborty, meatiest character at the dusk of his career). The 'bhadralok' baron has fallen out with 'Guru' (Bachchan, in a turning-point role and performance): a protégé he first promoted in pursuit of journalist truth; and someone he later disowned, despising his Machiavellian ways of buying off the news-media. A young, passionate reporter (Madhavan), gunning after Guru's illegal commercial practices, falls for Balan's crippled, young girl. The scene I speak of is where the two are alone, he formally proposes to her on a twilit stormy sea-front, and she turns him down saying she doesn't have that many days left to live. He says he wants all those days then. In that terse exchange, you can tell the 'Madras Talkies maestro' Mani Ratnam's remarkable magic with creating movie moments. The girl in question has much less screen-time or significance, if any, to the overall screenplay. Neither is their three-scene love story imbued with enough depth, history or consequence. Yet, for that minute, you sit, mildly moved. I have cited an arbitrary instance; there are many more obvious flashes of brilliance: like when Guru tells his close-friend he is willing to marry his sister (Rai; human, and fabulous) to gain capital for his business, right before he visits their home; when he pulls his wife onto the train to Bombay; as he celebrates the announcement of his first cloth mill And finally, with one side of his body inexplicably paralysed, in front of his shareholders, when Guru delivers a parting speech to a government inquiry commission arguing how what's illegal at a certain time may neither be an immoral or corrupt practice, nor wrong in the larger scheme of public good. It's a wonderfully succinct comment on the pampered, red-taped, bloated Indian state that for years has existed to discourage, or at any rate act as a road-block to new private entrepreneurship. In a manner of sepia-tinged, golf-cap Hollywood retro, the film is set right after independence, when the British were merely replaced by a lunatic License Raj. Despite the government, areas like Information Technology may have boomed here in the past few years. The situation is not too different still, for a self-made fortune-hunter, burdened under the litany of permits and kickbacks to set up his own cottage-company in this country. It's this subtle message, beside the film's marvelous topography (Rajeev Menon), simple narrative, Rahman's lilting score that gladden your spirits. For the incredible material of India's contemporary, corporate fairy-tale is at the hands of a right-minded commercial filmmaker. There may be shades of Mani's trademarked, earlier biopics (especially Nayakan) here. But by every means conceivable for 'Bollywood mainstream', this is almost a detailed account of the rise, fall and rise of the 'Polyester Prince' Dhirubhai Ambani. The makers don't appear attempting to conceal the source too. You follow the brash, ambitious, earthy Gujarati lad gate-crash, or sideline an elitist, English-speaking, public-school-educated club of 'old money'. And you eventually finish with a success story and a stadium accommodating the largest number of public share-holders for a company ever. We could perhaps type ' Dhirajlal Hirachand' on the wikepedia and fill the gaps if any for the series of minutiae of the interim of about two and half decades. Each of which gets a cursory mention, since there's little patience and time-frame for the pinpointed specifics. It's still not quite a fully funded hagiography though: the clash between Marx, materialism and a dubious morality cannot be ignored right through this grey character's journey. So far, history has judged the film's late real-life hero well. His cheerily-crafted, exquisitely-exhilarating, pop-historical account, at no level, disappoints either. Do yourself a favour, don't miss it! http://www.mumbaimirror.com/net/mmpaper.aspx?page=article§id=30&contentid=20070113023330218aab6f9c5
