In one of the film's high
dramatic moments shot on a small deserted railway station in the night,
the film's protagonists, now estranged by an unfortunate series of
circumstances, sit on the bench and... well, they sob. Yes, they simply
cry their hearts out. First, the girl. Then in a melancholic
celebration of the me-too syndrome, the boy, now alas no longer a boy
(and he smokes to prove it), also breaks into little sobs that build up
into a wail as the shehnai, indicative of a cruel marital joke, plays
in the background.
The sequence in the hands of a lesser
director would have fallen flat on its sobbing face. Luv Ranjan has the
punch-filled boys-will-be-boys saga "Pyaar Ka Punchnama" behind him to
prove his solid grip over the grammar of the hearts of the young and
the confused.
Akaash (Kartik Tiwari) and Vani (Nushrat
Bharucha) seem clueless about what they really want out of life, or
from each other. Is Akaash fooling around with her in the college ? Is
he serious in his filmy antics? Or filmy in his serious antics?
Ranjan's screenplay takes the lovers
from the corny escapades and frigid philosophising of the college
campus to the precipice of heartbreak. The journey, given a vivid
visual manifestation by Sudhir K. Chaudhuri's fluid camera work, is
made with ample feeling and remarkable restrain.
Unlike other contemporary celluloid
raconteurs, Ranjan is not fearful of silences. He doesn't fill up every
conceivable nook and corner of the storytelling with words and music,
though I must state here that Hitesh Sonik's background music and the
songs in the later part of the film go a long way in building an
appealing case for the lead pair's star-crossed relationship. If Akaash
and Vani seem so lost without each other, it is a lot to do with the
way their emotions are pinned down by the words and the music that
underline the course of their togetherness.
On many occasions, Ranjan allows the
lead pair to share silences. A rarity in today's cinema, where it is
presumed that the average moviegoer has the attention-span of a sparrow
looking for twigs before the rain starts pelting down. There are long
meditative stretches of just simple non-verbal communication between
the protagonists. It is a risk to allow audiences to get restive. But a
risk worth taking.
Ranjan's lovers come across as people
who do what they do not to impress others, but simply because their
heart tells them to behave the way they are shown. Both the lead actors
are extremely effective in showing their character's innerworld.
Nushrat Bharucha has an author-backed role as the girl who must
sacrifice her love to make her parents happy. Not exactly the most
novel of ideas. The sincerity with which the young almost-new actress
approaches her part, propels it to a level beyond the mundane.
Yes, you feel the girl is trapped in a
marriage of compromise where the cruelty is so intangible and prone to
sarcasm, that it seems negligible from the outside. Ranjan shows Vani's
suffocation through some disturbing scenes of marital rape. Outwardly,
Vani's husband is no brute. She carries no signs of his cruelty on her
body. It is worse. The soul gets wounded.
In a languorously-shot lengthy stretch
of post-marital escape into Utopian happiness, we see Vani united with
her lover again. They spend time together, frolic in the snow, live out
some of the dreams they had dreamt during courtship. They don't talk
much. And when they do, the words are never meant to impress us. For a
change, the couple seems to be talking to each other rather than to an
imaginary audience.
Though the film belongs to the female
protagonist, Kartik Tiwari manages to hold his own with an endearing
performance far removed from what he attempted in the director's "Pyaar
Ka Punchnama". Both Kartik and Nushrat are here to stay.
Though there are patches of aridity in
the relationship (what was Akaash doing while Vani was suffering in
malfunctional domesticity?), this is a very good film about a bad
marriage, or what havoc a wrong decision about one's life can create.
To his credit, Ranjan is able to hold
the lovers' predicament in place. He has a keen eye for the inner life
of his protagonists. Ranjan quietly sucks us into the story of Akaash
and Vani.
Suffused in contemplative silences and
deriving its dramatic energy from the age-old debate on arranged versus
love marriages, "Akaash Vani" is thoughtful and absorbing, not prone
to tripping over with nervous anxiety and excessive energy to hold our
attention.
The world of "Akaash Vani" is far
removed from the bantering bawdy backchat of "Pyaar Ka Punchnama". But
that is the beauty of the second film. It tells you that the director is
not frozen in his initial world.
With first-rate performances by both Nushrat and Kartik, this is one love story you can't afford to miss.