Vikramaditya Motwane, the
creator of that flawless gem ‘Udaan’ is back again with his adaptation of
O.Henry’s short story ‘The Last Leaf’. Taking the premise and weaving a saga of
love, longing, betrayal and redemption around it, his ‘Lootera’ is a modern day
masterpiece, doing perfect justice to a timeless classic much in the same way
as Rituparno Ghosh did with his interpretation of O.Henry’s ‘Gift of the Magi’
in ‘Raincoat’. ‘Lootera’ brings alive an era long buried in the sands of time.
The year is 1953. The zamindari system is taking its last breaths before the
government wrests their lands away. In Manikpur, West
Bengal , one such zamindar (veteran Bengali actor Barun Chanda)
dotes on his ailing daughter Pakhi (a brilliantly nuanced Sonakshi Sinha). At
the onset he tells her of that classic tale of the king whose life was
imprisoned in a parrot. Pakhi is his parrot. How that tales ties up beautifully
to the conclusion and the journey Pakhi’s heart takes across the mountains of
rousing love, heightened passions to plunge into the dark caves of loss and
betrayal before finding stable land in hope and renewed trust forms this
painting on celluloid.
Into Pakhi’s privileged,
sheltered world walks in Varun (a wonderfully restrained Ranveer Singh) and
brings that first flush of romance and longing into her restless heart. It is
as if she were waiting to fall in love. She does, with covert glances and
unmistakably playful hints. Varun introduces himself as an archeologist in
search of a lost civilization around the zamindar’s land and gains the
zamindar’s confidence to be allowed to stay with his friend in the man’s own
house. The initial hour of the movie is a lesson in depicting romance on
celluloid. The painting lessons that Pakhi initiates to gain proximity to
Varun, his desire to be able to paint a masterpiece, the languid days under the
sun of picnics and stolen glances are a throwback to old world romance. Pakhi’s
confession of her heart’s secret, the surprising rebuff and her utter shock and
inability to handle the pain of rejection are so heartfelt and real that it
forms an immediate connect with the audience. Varun’s subsequent yielding and
their lovemaking has to be the most beautifully portrayed scene of love I have
witnessed in recent times.
The movie takes a turn for the
dark in the later hour and is set in the winter snowed in landscape of
Dalhousie. The contrast between the sunny days of innocence and the later
coldness of betrayal, grief and angst is stark and poetic. The beauty lies in
that, within the tragedy the tale completes a circle to light up the eyes of
its protagonist with hope and faith once more. Love stories are dime a dozen in
the Hindi film industry. There is a lot of song and dancing, obstacles galore,
and the inevitable happy (sometimes tragic) end we witness time and again. But
to witness cinema so sublime, with emotions so raw and palpable, love so
relatable, is rare and in that rarity lies the utter beauty of Lootera. Towards
the climax is a scene where Pakhi asks Varun if he had ever really loved her.
Her need to know that answer even after her life has irrevocably been changed,
and his response filled with an honesty and desperate anguish is a moment of
great art. It is altogether heart wrenching in its reality. Anybody who has ever
desperately loved and lost can relate.
The movie is embellished with
great performances. Every character is a job well done from the zamindar, to
the friend and Varun’s partner in crime (Vikrant Massey), the zealous inspector
interestingly named K.N.Singh (a nod to that great villain of yore) played by
the wonderful Adil Hussain. But the soul of the love story is Pakhi and Varun,
Sonakshi Sinha and Ranveer Singh. Sonakshi is an actress I owe an apology to. I
have till now loathed her, a mere showpiece in mind numbing bollywood trash in
her short career so far. I was highly doubtful of her being cast in a
Vikramaditya Motwane movie because though I had no doubts of the director
excelling in his new venture, I had zero hope about the actress. For that I apologize.
Sonakshi gives a luminous performance in every frame, breathing life and fire
into the varying shades of her Pakhi’s journey. Her eyes twinkle and blaze at
correct intervals. Her self loathing at being betrayed by her own heart is
fierce. This is a performance to be forever proud of.
The previously gregarious
Ranveer Singh reins in his exuberance, to find a performance of restrain and
expresses with his eyes. That silent tear rolling down his cheek caught in the
mirror before his betrayal, shows us how far the actor has traveled with this
role. In Motwane’s capable hands both Ranveer and Sonakshi and by extension the
audience has discovered hidden actors in the two upcoming stars. Motwane had
previously made that beautiful coming of age tale, the story of a boy spreading
his wings out of the autocratic atmosphere at home in ‘Udaan’. He makes a
wonderful departure with this old world love story. His touch is evident in
every frame, his sensibilities and aesthetics making for a movie where the
atmosphere is soaked into the tale, there is none of the flashiness of period
cinema that we observe in other Indian movies set in lost times. But in the
sequences, the gestures, the dialogues we find an era long gone, a world that
was not so caught up in pace, where people lingered over conversations, over
emotions. That elusive old world charm is at play here in every masterful
frame. But most importantly it is the raw emotion of that beast called love and
subsequent heartbreak that is so effectively displayed, so hauntingly real in
its tone. The cinematography by Mahendra Shetty is beautifully mellow and
shifting with the moods. The music by Amit Trivedi harks of the golden days of
movie melody. The songs are seamlessly integrated into the narrative.
Movies like ‘Lootera’
reinforces that all is not lost in the Hindi film industry. Where only
formulaic cinema seem to thrive, once in a while, like the first drizzle of
rain on parched earth comes along cinema that can only be described as glorious
visual poetry, a wondrous painting with strokes of the various moods of love
deftly portrayed on the celluloidal canvas. This is the best movie to have come
out of the Hindi film industry this year and it will be a hard one to beat.
Released in 2013
In Hindi
My rating: 4.5/5
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